Senator Elizabeth Warren expressed outrage on Friday after pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson announced that its subsidiary, set up to handle tens of thousands of legal cases, alleging the company knew its talc-based products could cause the cancer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
“Here we go again,” Warren tweeted. “Another giant corporation is abusing our bankruptcy system.”
Johnson & Johnson’s newly formed subsidiary, LTL Management, is seeking Chapter 11 protection, which may prevent lawsuits from moving forward.
“Another giant corporation is abusing our bankruptcy system.”
Andy Birchfield, an attorney for the Beasley Allen law firm who has been involved in litigation against Johnson & Johnson, called the case “another example of the rich and powerful using bankruptcy as a hiding place to protect their profits and avoid their responsibility ”.
The legal file cited internal Johnson & Johnson documents regarding a 2010 advertising campaign that targeted “curvy southern women. [ages] 18-49 biasing African Americans, ”and noted that the company provides free samples in beauty salons despite internal knowledge that talc can be contaminated with asbestos during the extraction process.
Lawsuits against the company allege that the use of its products has led customers to develop cancers, including mesothelioma and ovarian cancer.
The bankruptcy filing comes four months after a Missouri appeals court ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay more than $ 2 billion to women who said their ovarian cancers were caused by the products. talcum powder from the company.
Considering the company “had a market capitalization of $ 472 billion in August of this year,” said Joseph Slatterley, another lawyer currently working on a case against Johnson & Johnson, the bankruptcy filing was “laughable.”
“It is wrong,” said the senator. “And this law would stop that.”
