The Missouri Supreme Court Building in Jefferson City (Jason Hancock/Missouri Independent).
German chemical giant Bayer must pay a $600 million Missouri court judgment that found its herbicide Roundup causes cancer, a ruling the company says could hasten a decision to stop making the popular product.
The Missouri Supreme Court on Sept. 30 refused to hear an appeal in the Cole County lawsuit that initially awarded four plaintiffs $1.56 billion. The October 2023 jury award was reduced to $611 million by Circuit Judge Daniel Green, a decision upheld in May by the Western District Court of Appeals.
In a statement to The Independent not attributed to any individual, Bayer said it was considering whether there were further appeals that could be filed.
“We continue to believe that significant and reversible errors were committed during trial and the appellate phase and warrant review by a higher court,” the company stated.
Matthew Clement, a Jefferson City attorney who worked on the case, said there are no appeals left except for an unlikely review by the U.S. Supreme Court. There is another Missouri case seeking an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court but justices have not decided whether to accept it.
“That’s rarely successful in state cases,” Clement said, “but they can certainly ask them to do that.”
The case is one of the few out of thousands filed in Cole County that has become final. As it fights in court, Bayer has also lobbied heavily for legislation to protect it from lawsuits at both the state and federal level.
The company has failed for two years to win passage of a bill intended to shield it from litigation in Missouri. The bill narrowly passed the Missouri House earlier this year but lobbying missteps, including a campaign targeting some of the most conservative members of the state Senate, doomed it. The company did win passage of similar legislation in North Dakota and in Georgia
Bayer has also sought protection from Congress. The spending bill to fund the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department would add protections intended to block state lawsuits. Similar language is being considered for inclusion in a new Farm Bill.
Bayer has faced an avalanche of litigation that claims glyphosate, the product patented by Missouri-based Monsanto in 1971, causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — and that the label fails to warn users of the risk.
Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 and operates its facilities under the name Bayer Crop Science.
Bayer has paid out about $11 billion to settle almost 100,000 lawsuits with approximately 61,000 pending, according to a website that tracks the litigation involving Roundup. The company has already stopped making Roundup with glyphosate for home use and, in September, announced it was seeking regulatory approval for a new herbicide to replace Roundup for agricultural and commercial use in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Australia and Brazil.
In the statement about the lawsuit, the company pointed to an April article in the Wall Street Journal about the future of Roundup.
“We’re pretty much reaching the end of the road,” Bayer chief executive Bill Anderson told the newspaper. “We’re talking months, not years.”
Plaintiffs and the award
In the case that is now final, a jury found that Jimmy Draeger of Eldon was due $5.6 million in compensatory damages and his wife, Brenda Draeger, was due $100,000 for loss of companionship as a result of his illness.
Draeger used Roundup to manage weeds on his property in Miller County.
The litigation also included Daniel Anderson of Lemon Grove, California, who was 32 when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after regularly using Roundup to manage weeds on his father’s property. He was awarded $38 million in compensatory damages.
Roundup weed killing products are offered for sale at a home improvement store on May 14, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois (Scott Olson/Getty Images).
Valorie Gunther, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after nearly 40 years of using Roundup to prevent and kill weeds on various properties she owned in New York, was awarded $17.5 million as part of the Cole County lawsuit.
The jury also awarded each plaintiff $500 million in punitive damages. Those awards were reduced by Green to $50.4 million for Jimmy Draeger, $342 million for Anderson and $157.5 million for Gunther.
The awards have been increasing at 9% interest until paid and the total is now in excess of $700 million.
The decision from the jury went beyond a claim that Monsanto — and later, Bayer — failed to warn users of potential risks to their health, Clement said. The jury also found that the company was liable for a design defect in its product and was negligent in taking action to protect consumers.
In its statement to The Independent, Monsanto said the courts didn’t recognize that it had already paid punitive damages in other cases and the compensatory awards should have been limited to actual medical expenses paid by the plaintiffs.
“The appellate court also failed to recognize that federal law preempts (the) plaintiff’s state-based failure to warn theory,” the statement read.
The company tried to win in court on those points, Clement said.
“Monsanto has made these arguments in front of numerous courts, and numerous judges and the courts have consistently found that Monsanto’s position is wrong,” he said.
Under state law, the plaintiffs and their attorneys won’t be the only beneficiaries of the award. Half of the punitive damages award will be deposited in the state’s Tort Victims Compensation Fund, which makes grants of up to $300,000 to people who prevail in lawsuits where the limits of insurance or other sources to pay the judgment are inadequate for the injuries.
About one-quarter of the money deposited in the Tort Victims Compensation Fund will go to a fund supporting legal services for the indigent plaintiffs through four legal service organizations: Legal Aid of Western Missouri, Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, Legal Services of Southern Missouri and Mid-Missouri Legal Services
The next fights
On Jan. 4, the day Missouri lawmakers return to Jefferson City for their annual session, a trial is scheduled to open in another case with four plaintiffs.
The plaintiffs are James Greco of Feasterville Trevose, Pennsylvania, who used Roundup for 30 years around his home and those of his family and while working for his father’s landscaping business; Thomas Rainwater of Earlington, Kentucky, who used Roundup while doing building reclamation work and at his home; Gary Roth of Marlboro, New Jersey who used Roundup from 1984 to 2003 while at work and at his home, as well as the home of his mother and his mother’s friends; and Jordan Harrison of Kingston, North Carolina, who worked in tobacco fields sprayed with Roundup and used it around his home.
All four plaintiffs were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma while in their 40s.
During this year’s legislative session, Bayer, a group called the the Modern Ag Alliance and the Protecting America Initiative, listed as an “electioneering communication” organization by the Federal Election Commission, spent heavily on radio and television ads, as well as flyers targeting individual lawmakers, in pursuit of the bill to protect Bayer from liability.
The ads present glyphosate as a benign, beneficial chemical essential to modern agriculture.
Among the company’s political allies, preaching the benefits of Roundup and decrying the litigation targeting its use, are Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe and newly-appointed Attorney General Catherine Hanaway.
Clement, who is among the lawyers preparing for the January trial, has been trying to pry loose company records on how much it has spent to influence legislators, the public and potential jurors.
A motion to make public relations documents public has been pending since March. Clement said he will push the court for a ruling before lawmakers return for the 2026 session.
The lawsuits, taken as a whole, have two goals, Clement said.
“The first would be to warn people about what this product really does, and allow them to make their own decisions about whether they want to use it,” he said.
The second goal is for Bayer to offer a safer alternative. The notices about Bayer seeking regulatory approval for a new product is an encouraging sign, he said.
“If they have the technology and the means to make a safer product,” Clement said, “that’s what we encourage them to do.”
