.jpg?20241125')
Eron Evans died in 2016 at 41 of ovarian cancer, leaving behind two daughters. Her grieving mother, Darlene, blames Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder – and she’s pursuing a lawsuit her daughter started a decade ago, alleging the company’s talc caused the deadly illness.
The 71-year-old Houston-area grandmother has drained her savings caring for the girls, she said.
Now she and tens of thousands of other claimants face a July 26 deadline to vote on J&J’s third attempt at a controversial bankruptcy manoeuvre that would cap its liability and set up a fund to pay victims.
“I don’t know how much longer I can carry on,” Evans told Reuters. “I feel pressure that I should probably vote ‘yes.’”
After being rebuffed twice by federal courts, the $350 billion healthcare giant is attempting again to end the litigation in a so-called “Texas two-step” bankruptcy.
The manoeuvre involves offloading its talc liability onto a newly created subsidiary, which then declares Chapter 11.
The goal is to use the proceeding to force all plaintiffs into one settlement – without requiring J&J itself to file bankruptcy.
But the company needs the votes of 75% of claimants before the subsidiary can ask a bankruptcy judge to impose the deal on all of them.
J&J faces lawsuits from more than 61,000 plaintiffs but the figure swells as high as 100,000 when counting claimants who haven’t sued, according to Erik Haas, J&J’s global vice president of litigation.
The company maintains its talc products are safe and do not cause cancer.
Some plaintiffs’ lawyers, including Evans’, are urging their clients to support the settlement.
Her attorney, Jim Onder, called the offer a good-enough deal to take, given the alternative. Some of his clients, he said, are dying while the legal fight drags on.
&uuid=(email))