Georgia jurors award $2.1 billion verdict against Bayer in Roundup lawsuit

A Georgia jury found pharmaceutical and agricultural products giant Bayer liable for more than $2 billion in damages to a plaintiff who argued that Roundup weed killer caused his cancer, the latest hit in a series of legal fights over the herbicide glyphosate.

The penalties awarded by jurors on Friday include $65 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, plaintiff’s law firms Arnold & Itkin and Kline & Specter told the Washington Post in a statement. Bayer’s Monsanto subsidiary said it would appeal the verdict.

Plaintiff John Barnes originally filed a lawsuit in 2021, seeking damages related to his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Barnes alleged in his complaint that there should have been more warnings about “defective and unreasonably dangerous products.”

Bayer has been tied up in Roundup litigation since its 2018 acquisition of Monsanto. The company has prevailed in 17 of roughly two dozen trials. Of some 181,000 claims in total, about 114,000 have been settled or did not move forward for various reasons, according to Bayer’s 2024 annual report.

“Our track record demonstrates that we win when plaintiffs’ attorneys and their experts are not allowed to misrepresent the worldwide regulatory and scientific assessments that continue to support the products’ safety,” Monsanto said.

But plaintiffs also won some cases against Bayer before Friday’s verdict, including trials in which juries awarded billions of dollars to plaintiffs. So far, Bayer has paid about $10 billion to settle claims that Roundup and glyphosate cause cancer. The company has set aside $5.9 billion more for ongoing litigation, according to its 2024 annual report.

A handful of Bayer’s losses – including cases in 2019 and 2024 that initially awarded billions to plaintiffs – have seen damages drastically reduced on appeal, even when judges agree that Roundup led to plaintiffs’ cancer, or that Monsanto knew glyphosate may be dangerous but didn’t issue the right warnings. In some instances, judges cited constitutional limits on punitive damages.

Monsanto pointed to some $2.4 billion in jury awards from 2018 and 2019 – which were ultimately reduced to $132.6 million – to back up its argument that the damages were excessive, and that juries and plaintiffs got it wrong. But more recent cases in which judges upheld a $175 million judgment against Monsanto, or reduced verdicts by smaller amounts, have bolstered plaintiffs’ arguments that the company is still liable.

Many of the cases rest on glyphosate, introduced as a herbicide by Monsanto in the 1970s. The chemical inhibits a certain enzyme in most plants and prevents them from growing.

Various commissions around the world disagree on whether glyphosate causes cancer in people. But the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer found in 2015 that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

In a Saturday statement to the Post, Monsanto said it stood behind Roundup’s safety.