A New York doctor discovered the risks of producing research for plaintiff lawyers after a federal judge ruled Johnson & Johnson can proceed with a lawsuit accusing Dr. Jacqueline Moline of fabricating an article claiming 33 people contracted cancer from asbestos-tainted talcum powder.
After a lengthy legal fight, Moline was ordered to turn over the names of the subjects in her study. And J&J quickly discovered at least 11 people in her study had blamed other sources of asbestos for their cancer in lawsuits, including three who paid Dr. Moline to provide expert testimony about those non-talc exposures.
Faced with such evidence, Judge Georgette Castner in New Jersey reversed an earlier dismissal and allowed J&J to proceed with a lawsuit against Moline for trade libel.
The company’s “new allegations when accepted as true for the purposes of a motion to dismiss render it plausible that Dr. Moline fabricated or misrepresented the underlying data from which her conclusions were drawn,” Castner wrote in Feb. 27 opinion.
The ruling helps J&J in its campaign to neutralize highly paid plaintiff experts who are essential to tens of thousands of lawsuits claiming asbestos-contaminated talcum powder causes mesothelioma, a deadly cancer of the chest lining, and ovarian cancer. Without scientific testimony that talc contains asbestos – which J&J denies – and that the trace amounts of asbestos in talc can cause cancer, the lawsuits won’t survive motions to dismiss.
A problem for plaintiff lawyers is some of their most dependable experts, including Moline, started working asbestos cases long before the talc theory emerged and can be accused of switching their opinions once they were paid to identify talc as a cause. William Longo, for example, claims to have found asbestos fibers in old bottles of Johnson’s Baby Powder and other cosmetic talc products. But until he was paid to provide evidence in talc cases, he dismissed claims of asbestos in talc as “urban legend.”
Moline, an occupational health specialist with Hofstra University’s Northwell Health in New York, has testified in hundreds of asbestos lawsuits, most of them accusing other companies of causing a plaintiff’s illness. That record came back to haunt her in 2019 when she published an article in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine describing 33 mesothelioma patients with “no other identifiable source of exposure apart from cosmetic talc.”
After the article came out, Dr. Moline cited the findings in court testimony and before Congress, even explaining that the talc theory emerged because experts had no other way to explain how women with no history of industrial exposure to asbestos came down with mesothelioma.
Johnson & Johnson blamed her article, along with sympathetic coverage by the Reuters newswire, for declines in talc sales and its ultimate decision to remove the product from the U.S. market. The company offered $9 billion to settle outstanding ovarian cancer claims, after twice failing to resolve litigation through bankruptcy, but an effort by the firm Beasley Allen defeated the settlement and sent the claims back to courts.
Dr. Moline’s claims of “no other known exposure” were dubious from the start, since everyone in the modern-built environment inhales asbestos fibers daily in far larger volumes than the trace amounts plaintiff experts claim to find in cosmetic talc. But in Dr. Moline’s case, it was particularly difficult to square with the fact some of the patients in her article had claimed alternative exposures, and she knew it.
Dr. Moline has consistently declined comment on the litigation and acknowledged one example of alternate exposure in an erratum to her original article. But J&J detailed multiple others, including Stephen Lanzo, who Dr. Moline testified for in a lawsuit claiming exposure to asbestos-coated pipe.
Dr. Moline also testified in the case of Doris Jackson, saying she was exposed to “ceiling pipes with degrading insulation while working as a teacher.” In her article, Dr. Moline said Jackson, identified as “Case #3”, “had no exposures to asbestos other than talcum powder.”
Plaintiff talc experts were further undermined when a federal judge in Virginia allowed a similar lawsuit to proceed against three more doctors who published an article claiming 75 subjects developed cancer after being exposed to talc.
Drs. Theresa Emory, John Maddox, and Richard Kradin, described by the judge as “prolific plaintiff-side expert witnesses,” published the follow-up to Dr. Moline’s study in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine 2020. Some of the same unnamed subjects of that study were in Dr. Moline’s paper.
Judge Castner said Dr. Moline may have had a financial motive for issuing the tainted talc report to “add a veneer of credibility” to her work as an expert witness after courts had “repeatedly barred Dr. Moline from offering testimony.”
