A court has ruled that Johnson and Johnson can NOT hide behind bankruptcy to avoid lawsuits. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: They don’t know the history of Donald Segretti and Richard Nixon and how he put these folks together to do these cultural dirty tricks. And then Ronald Reagan wins for President. George Bush one wins for president, solely based on the type of culture war that he’s trying to promote here.
A court has ruled that Johnson and Johnson can’t hide behind bankruptcy to avoid the lawsuits, to avoid being responsible. This company, look, they have known, they’ve known, let’s see, for four decades that their product was causing cancer in women and they knew the exact mechanics of how it was causing cancer. Wasn’t any guesswork. Their lab studies showed it. Pick it up from there.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. They would go in, in their own studies and, and take the tumors out of the women who they were marketing these products to and find their own fibers that they could trace back. They knew it was their stuff. They knew what it was causing. They knew the, you know, asbestos was in some of these. They knew 100% for many, many decades. Told no one. And actually moved into a more aggressive marketing approach with it, going to, you know, predominantly minority communities advertising this product as, hey, you don’t have time to take a shower toss on the baby powder. I mean, I’ve gone through just like you have. We’ve seen the advertising documents. They’re sick.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. They actually, they, that it was a cultural issue.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: They knew that their, their marketing was primarily for African-American women, for whatever reason that was passed on generation to generation. So they didn’t want to change the formulation, which all they had to do was put something in there besides what they were putting in there to kill people. They didn’t even need that thing to kill people. But they kept it on the market only because they invested so much into the branding of the market. And the documents show that. I mean, they, there was no, there was no problem fixing the problem. They knew they could do it. But, you know, what I find interesting about this, first of all, they go into bankruptcy. It’s $140 billion company. Okay. Thank God we had good judges that reviewed that and said, really? I mean, you know, you’re really coming to us and saying, you have to declare bankruptcy with $140 billion. And the judges that wrote that opinion are brilliant. I’m telling you, it was one of the best written opinions. I mean, it was so smart the way they approached it, basically saying, have we just left our common sense at the door here? You know, and so this judge that did, the judge that agreed to accept this was humiliated. I mean, absolutely humiliated.
Farron Cousins: Was it, was it New Jersey the judge was originally from?
Mike Papantonio: Yes, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I think it’s an important decision. One thing it does is we see all of these companies trying to move there. They’re all trying to say, well, we have to declare bankruptcy. We’re, I think the next one we are gonna hear about was 3M. Okay. 3M has caused so much suffering in this country with PFAS, with the, the ear hearing loss cases for servicemen. We were getting ready to see them make the same move. Let me tell you this, this opinion written by these brilliant, absolutely brilliant judges, I think put it, I think they put a stop to it. So.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And what people have to understand is that these major corporations, what they’ll do is they create a new business entity and they’ll spin off this, you know, the bad product to the new entity that has zero money.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: So they’ll say, no, no, no. We, we don’t own the talcum powder. That’s owned by, you know, Johnson, Johnson and Johnson.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And then the judge will say, okay, well clearly they have no money. So all the liability pool, there’s no money to pull from.
Mike Papantonio: Let me segue into a, in a story you know about because we did this story. There’s this woman out there, her name is Susan, Suzanne Spaulding. Okay. She comes from Homeland Security Cybersecurity, CIA, Corporate America has, has grabbed her. Okay. What they’ve done now is they’re out on, they’re out talking about the idea of how dangerous it is to be critical of the justice system or the judiciary. Matter of fact, I’ve been under personal attack by this woman.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Because we did a story on her. We uncovered the fact that she’s so connected to corporate America, it’s just a scam. She shows up at judges, at judges and lawyers conferences and talks about the idea how dangerous it is to talk about judges. We looked at the cases that, the stories we’ve done, it’s more than 95% of the time. We’re talking about good job. Like this case. Good job. But the, what’s happening, and I think it’s important to the viewers because they’re gonna see some of this, it used to be 15 or 20 years ago, the Chamber of Commerce, who she’s an extension of or associated injuries, industry who she’s an extension of, used to go around and they would talk to the public about how bad trial lawyers were. They’re trying to keep verdicts down. Now, the new thing, let’s convince judges that these lawyers are bad. So we’re onto this. As a matter of fact, there’s gonna be a cover story magazine, a cover story in National Trial Lawyer Magazine about her and we’re gonna tell this story more and more. But I, in this situation, how can you say anything but, but say, these judges did a wonderful job?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, they’re brilliant and if you’re, if you’re an attorney reading their opinion, you see how critically smart they are. And it’s amazing to me. I mean, I always love to see that. And we see it in this case for sure.
