Less than three weeks after a group of cancer victims filed a motion against Johnson & Johnson attempting to block the company’s latest bankruptcy plan—which comes with a $6.5 billion class-action settlement offer—a New Jersey federal court has quashed the effort.
U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp rejected the plaintiffs’ attempt to gain a temporary restraining order that would have put the bankruptcy plan on hold.
The decision comes with less than a month left for plaintiffs to vote whether to accept the settlement. If 75% of the roughly 60,000 plaintiffs in the multidistrict case agree to the offer, it will resolve their claims that years of use of J&J’s talcum products caused their ovarian cancers.
Shipp ruled that the claimants’ argument that J&J was causing “irreparable harm” with an insufficient settlement offer was “strictly speculative” and was not “fit for adjudication.”
“Allegations of future harm are strictly contingent on future events that have not yet occurred, and in fact, may never occur,” Shipp wrote in the ruling.
As the multidistrict case has lingered for three years and through two other failed Chapter 11 attempts, two groups of claimants have emerged—those anxious to accept a settlement and those who are holding out, hoping to take their cases to jury trials and potentially score a huge award such as the $2.1 billion that 22 women from 12 states secured from a Missouri court in 2018.
Three months ago, an Illinois jury ordered J&J to pay the family of a woman who died of mesothelioma $45 million.
But, of the cases that have gone to trial, J&J has won a majority of them. The company has stuck to its claim there is no conclusive evidence that its talc products contained asbestos or caused cancer.
J&J has taken the products off the market, first in North America in 2020 and then the rest of the world in 2023. The company now sells a cornstarch version of the baby powder.