Bayer Loses Third Appeal of Roundup Herbicide Cancer Verdict
- Panel of judges upholds $86.7 million damages against company
- Continuing legal woes stem from 2018 acquisition of Monsanto
Bayer AG’s Roundup woes deepened as it lost another appeal of a jury verdict finding its weed killer causes cancer, the company’s third consecutive appeals court loss of the cases that have gone to trial.
A California appeals court in San Francisco refused to overturn the 2019 verdict in which a jury awarded more than $2 billion to a couple who claimed they fell ill after using the herbicide for more than three decades. It was the eighth-largest product-defect award in U.S. history. The appeals court left intact the trial judge’s decision to reduce the award to $86.7 million.
The decision comes after Leverkusen, Germany-based Bayer recently set aside an additional $4.5 billion to deal with thousands of Roundup suits, bringing its reserves for the cases to more than $16 billion. The company also said its Monsanto unit will pull the current version of Roundup off the U.S. consumer lawn and garden market in 2023.