At a May 3 hearing, Johnson & Johnson lawyer Allison Brown pleaded with a bankruptcy judge not to allow a trial alleging its baby powder caused a 24-year-old man’s mesothelioma. Doing so, she argued, would threaten an $8.9 billion settlement with nearly 60,000 talc claimants.
“What could threaten more, your honor, the efforts to get a plan out to tens of thousands of people than to allow one of them to proceed with a single trial?” she said.
