(Reuters) -A California jury found Bayer liable in a case brought by a man who claimed his cancer was due to exposure to the company’s Roundup weed killer, and ordered it to pay $332 million in damages, Law.com reported on Tuesday.
The verdict includes $325 million in punitive damages and $7 million in compensatory damages awarded to plaintiff Mike Dennis, who was diagnosed at age 51 with a form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the report said.
While jurors in San Diego County Superior Court found that Bayer-owned Monsanto failed to warn about the health risks of Roundup, they did not find that the agricultural seeds and pesticide maker was negligent in defectively designing the product, the report added.
“We respectfully disagree with the jury’s adverse verdict, though it found in favor of the company on two of the four claims,” a Bayer spokesperson told Reuters.
The company believes it has “strong arguments on appeal to get this unfounded verdict overturned and the unconstitutionally excessive damage award eliminated or reduced, given that there were significant and reversible legal and evidentiary errors made during this trial,” the spokesperson added.
Lawyers representing the plaintiff could not be reached outside of business hours.
This marks the third trial loss for Bayer this month, after being hit by a $175 million verdict and a $1.25 million verdict in two separate Roundup trials. Before that, it had won nine consecutive trials over similar claims.
Roundup-related lawsuits have dogged Bayer since it acquired the brand as part of its $63 billion purchase of Monsanto in 2018.
(Reporting by Surbhi Misra and Gursimran Kaur in Bengaluru; Editing by Jamie Freed)
