TRENTON, N.J. (Legal Newsline) - Johnson & Johnson has asked a federal bankruptcy judge to block Reuters from publishing details of internal documents it says a plaintiff lawyer gave the news service in violation of a court confidentiality order.
Citing a 2018 “Reuters investigation” into supposed asbestos contamination of talcum powder that turned out to be based almost entirely upon documents provided by plaintiff attorney Mark Lanier, the company said it appeared a lawyer with access to confidential documents once again provided Reuters with the fodder for an article that would help the plaintiffs’ case.
In a Feb. 3 filing with U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michael Kaplan in New Jersey, J&J said Reuters reporter Mike Spector sent an e-mail requesting comment on internal documents including a May 17, 2021, special meeting of the board of directors in which J&J General Counsel Michael Ullman discussed talc litigation, and communications regarding the strategy of putting its talc liabilities into the unit that later filed for bankruptcy.
“These documents are not available from any public source and could not possibly have been obtained other than through willful violation of the protective order to which the parties agreed and that this Court entered,” J&J said. The company requested an injunction prohibiting Reuters from publishing the contents of the documents as well as an order for all attorneys with access to the documents to submit declarations stating whether they leaked them to the news service.
The 2018 Reuters story said J&J knew there was asbestos in its Johnson’s Baby Powder. It was based on plaintiff theories that had already been raised publicly in numerous lawsuits. But J&J shares dropped after publication, prompting lawyers to file a securities class action claiming the article contained “corrective disclosures” that presented new information to the stock market.
That claim appears to be false, based on a declaration Lanier filed Dec. 20 in the securities lawsuit. While Reuters said its reporting revealed “new details” from “never-before-seen internal J&J documents,” Lanier said he was the primary source for the article by Reuters writer Lisa Girion and it was based on public information.
“Everything I provided to Ms. Girion was publicly available prior to the publication of the Reuters article,” Lanier said. “I carefully and intentionally did not give Reuters or Ms. Girion any material not already in the public domain.”
After the article’s publication, Lanier told CNBC in a national program that it “serves my purposes as a litigator to say `Yes, get their attention; keep driving the stock down.’”
“Given the history of talc plaintiffs’ lawyers feeding documents to Reuters that Reuters authors then weave into slanted broadsides against J&J, it takes little imagination to conclude that the same pattern has repeated itself here,” the company told the bankruptcy judge.
Johnson & Johnson announced plans to stop selling talcum powder last year, although the company maintains plaintiff claims it contains asbestos are false. It formed a new unit, LTL Management LLC, to hold the talc liabilities and put it in bankruptcy in October.
Plaintiff lawyers are fighting the tactic, saying it was an illegal attempt to shield Johnson & Johnson from continuing liability over talc.
Talc litigation sprang up as the population of traditional industrial asbestos plaintiffs who were exposed to the substance in shipyards and factories shrank. Highly paid plaintiff experts, using disputed definitions of asbestos fibers, claim they have found the deadly substance in decades-old bottles of talcum powder lawyers bought from eBay and other sources. J&J says the experts are misidentifying talc particles or detecting ambient asbestos that may have gotten into the opened bottles of talc over the years.