Plaintiffs’ attorneys in a Monsanto cancer trial revealed their ‘smoking gun’ during opening arguments in St. Louis County Court this week, but defense counsel doused it with news that the litigant had been cured for 10 years.
On Courtroom View Network, Aimee Wagstaff, attorney for plaintiff Sharlean Gordon, referenced a 2009 internal document by Donna Farmer, lead toxicologist in Monsanto’s product safety center, which stated, “You cannot say that Roundup does not cause cancer. We have not done the carcinogenicity studies with Roundup.”
Roundup, produced by Monsanto, is an herbicide used to kill weeds that have sprouted among crops. Its active ingredient is glyphosate which plaintiffs nationwide allege causes cancer.
The German-based company, Bayer, inherited the Roundup litigation after it acquired the St. Louis-based Monsanto for $63 billion in 2018.
“This case is about Monsanto taking away Ms. Gordon's choice to expose herself to a dangerous chemical and we think that the evidence will show that Monsanto knew of the dangers and that they should have warned,” Wagstaff said in open court on April 26.
Farmer is one of seven current and former Monsanto employees that Wagstaff plans to present to the jury in Sharlean Gordon v The Monsanto Company including Monsanto Corporate Representative Bill Reeves, Medical Sciences and Outreach Lead Daniel Goldstein, Toxicologist Dr. William Heydens, Epidemiologist John Aquavella, as well as Toxicologist David Saltmiras.
“You're going to hear about a lot of events that happened around 2015 that called the safety of Roundup into question,” Wagstaff told the jury. “You're going to hear that 2015 was when the public started to hear what happened when the House of Cards started to tumble. 2015 is when that started to happen and you're going to hear that right around that time in 2015, Donna Farmer became their product spokesperson. Part of her job was to defend glyphosate in Roundup.”
After spraying the herbicide Roundup from 1992 to 2017 while gardening, Gordon developed a subtype of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma called DLBCL in 2006. She blames Monsanto for her illness and sued in the 21st Judicial Circuit Court of Missouri in St. Louis County.
However, Monsanto’s defense attorney, Katherine Hacker of Bartit Beck LLP, argued that Gordon has been cured of cancer for more than 10 years.
“Ms. Gordon starts chemotherapy by the end of the year and then a few years later, Ms. Gordon also has a stem cell transplant to treat her cancer,” Hacker told the jury. “Those treatments are miracles of modern science. As effective as they are, they are difficult on the body but the good news is that they worked. So, in three years, by the end of 2009, Ms. Gordon's doctors got to deliver the good news. Her cancer was gone.”
A representative from Bayer issued the following statement to clarify Farmer's email:
"The full text of the email, other documents, and all testimony make clear that Monsanto did not believe or suspect that Roundup or glyphosate causes cancer. Plaintiff relied on a sentence of one email in which Dr. Farmer correctly advised a public relations employee that he should not say that animal carcinogenicity studies show that 'Roundup'—the formulation—does not cause cancer, because glyphosate itself, not the formulation, was the subject of these studies. Epidemiology studies, on the other hand, including the large independent National Cancer Institute study have examined glyphosate-based herbicides such as the formulation and concluded that they do not cause cancer. Prior to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)'s announcement in 2015, no regulatory or scientific body had found glyphosate-based herbicides to have even the potential to cause cancer in humans, and, following the IARC report, regulatory authorities in the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, Korea, and New Zealand reaffirmed that glyphosate is not associated with increased rates of cancer and is safe for use."