Baby Powder and Perjury: The Sixty-Year Asbestos Cover-Up at Johnson & Johnson
An Essay
Preface
This essay draws extensively on No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris, published by Penguin Random House in 2025. Harris, a former New York Times reporter who covered the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA for over a decade, spent years assembling the documentary record underlying this story—internal memos, depositions, trial transcripts, and corporate communications that reveal the gap between what Johnson & Johnson knew and what it told the public. The book is an essential work of investigative journalism, and readers seeking the full evidentiary record should consult it directly. The argument I develop here—that the J&J case reveals structural failures in corporate accountability rather than individual villainy—is my own, but it rests on Harris’s meticulous reconstruction of events.
On July 23, 2019, John Hopkins, a former Johnson & Johnson talc executive who had served for years as the company’s designated representative in talc litigation, sat in a courtroom and acknowledged that the company’s top talc executive had lied under oath. The sworn testimony in question had declared that asbestos had never been found in Johnson & Johnson’s talc mines or products.
“And that is—you understand that is perjury, do you not?” the lawyer asked.
“I do,” Hopkins responded.
This admission came thirty-six years after the original false testimony, and more than sixty years after Johnson & Johnson first learned its talc was contaminated with asbestos. During that span, an estimated 2,500 American women were diagnosed with talc-linked ovarian cancer annually, with 1,500 dying each year. The company continued selling its talc-based Baby Powder until 2020, long after competitors had switched to cornstarch. The perjury admission did not result in criminal charges. No executive went to prison. Johnson & Johnson remains among the most profitable companies in the world and one of the most admired brands in history.
The case reveals not individual villainy but structural failure—a series of mechanisms that enable corporations to knowingly harm consumers for decades without meaningful consequence. Each mechanism deserves examination: the industry-designed testing protocols calibrated to miss contamination, the regulatory capture that turned the FDA into an ally, the mythology that transformed ethical reputation into a shield for misconduct, the legal system’s inability to create deterrence. Together, they constitute an architecture of impunity.
The timeline itself tells a story. In 1958, J&J commissioned an independent lab analysis that found 1 to 3 percent asbestos contaminants in its talc. In 1968, a Mount Sinai researcher found all major talcum powders, including Johnson’s Baby Powder, contaminated with asbestos. In 1971, the company publicly declared its powder contained no asbestos while privately admitting to the FDA that it contained up to 1 percent. In 1977, the industry adopted a testing standard designed to miss contamination. In 1983, documents proving contamination were destroyed and replaced with false affidavits. In 2019, the FDA found asbestos in Johnson’s Baby Powder. In 2020, the company stopped selling the talc-based product in North America, blaming “misinformation” and “litigation advertising.” Throughout this sixty-year arc, the structural features that enabled the harm remained constant.
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The Architecture of Invisibility
The talc industry needed a testing standard that would be widely perceived as stringent but wouldn’t actually find asbestos when it was present at concerning levels. In 1976, the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association—an industry trade group—set out to create one.
The FDA’s cosmetics office had proposed a testing method that would ensure talc products were 99.99 percent free of asbestos. The agency estimated that at least a third of talc-based cosmetics then being sold would fail this test. Johnson & Johnson’s Wilson Nashed wrote the FDA that “methods capable of determining less than 1% asbestos in talc are not necessary to assure the safety of cosmetic talc.” The industry pushed for a 1 percent standard instead of the FDA’s proposed 0.01 percent.
An FDA official scoffed that the industry’s position was “foolish.” No mother, he said, was going to powder her baby with 1 percent of a known carcinogen regardless of safety factors. But the FDA’s cosmetics office, perennially underfunded and lacking legal authority, quietly withdrew its proposal.
The industry then created the J4-1 testing method. A CTFA memo urged adoption “before the art advances to more sophisticated techniques with higher levels of sensitization.” The standard used techniques incapable of detecting even substantial levels of asbestos. Instead of using relatively large quantities of talc and concentrating them to ensure trace quantities of asbestos were found, J4-1 used microscopic quantities.
J&J executives had long known that concentration methods—placing talc in a centrifuge to make asbestos far easier to find—were the best way to detect contamination, capable of finding concentrations as low as 0.05 percent. J4-1 deliberately avoided such methods. It would be like using a bathroom scale to weigh a pin.
One of the most common talc contaminants is chrysotile asbestos, known as white asbestos and the only type still used in the United States today. J4-1 wasn’t designed to detect chrysotile.
The CTFA sent talc to seven different labs and asked them to examine products using only J4-1. Fourteen samples had been deliberately spiked with asbestos. No lab detected more than three of the fourteen. Four of the labs failed to detect a single spiked sample.
At a meeting on May 17, 1977, John Schelz, a J&J executive who chaired the CTFA talc committee, acknowledged that the committee’s stated goal was to make J4-1 testing “accurate, reliable and practical.” The failure of the labs to detect the spiked samples meant “these objectives have not yet been achieved.”
The CTFA adopted J4-1 unchanged.
The FDA largely ended its oversight of talcum powder, relying on manufacturers to test their own products. In a 2019 deposition, Dr. Susan Nicholson, a J&J talc safety executive, admitted the company hadn’t sent the agency a single talc test result since 1973.
What They Knew, What They Said
The documentary record contains two parallel tracks: internal acknowledgments of contamination and public denials of it.
In 1958, Johnson & Johnson sent several tons of talc to the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio. Battelle advised that the best way to improve the powder was to remove impurities, which were “less than 1 percent to about 3 percent of contaminants”—mostly asbestos.
In 1964, Johnson & Johnson—worried about the political stability of Italy, according to internal documents—decided to transition from importing Italian talc and purchased a set of talc mines in Vermont with names like Argonaut, Rainbow, Frostbite, and Black Bear. One of the mines was located in Johnson, Vermont, a few hundred yards from an asbestos mine and three miles from what was once the largest chrysotile asbestos mine in the United States. That colocation was no accident. Talc and asbestos are so chemically, geologically, and structurally similar that veins of one are often sandwiched between or ribboned with the other. Once intermingled, talc and asbestos are impossible to completely separate.
In 1967, a memorandum from William Ashton, a top J&J talc executive, contained a table of impurities that included trace quantities of two kinds of asbestos. The following year, Ashton wrote to a company scientist expressing worry about tremolite’s “needle type crystals” and noting that some environmental health agencies had “severe objections” to tremolite’s presence in talcum powders. “The question is,” Ashton concluded, “how bad is Tremolite medically, and how much of it can safely be in a talc base we might develop?”
Dr. T. M. Thompson, Johnson & Johnson’s associate director of clinical research, responded with a memo acknowledging the company’s long-standing awareness: “Over the years, the recently deceased Robert Wood Johnson II had expressed concerns about whether talcum powder adversely impacted the lungs of babies or mothers.” Thompson added a prescient warning: “Since the usage of these products is so widespread, and the existence of pulmonary disease is increasing, it is not inconceivable that we could become involved in litigation in which pulmonary fibrosis or other changes might be rightfully or wrongfully attributed to inhalation of our powder formulations.”
In 1968, Dr. Arthur M. Langer, a researcher at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, purchased popular talcum powders including Johnson’s Baby Powder and ran them through an electron microscope. All were contaminated with asbestos.
On June 29, 1971, New York City’s top environmental protection official, Jerome Kretchmer, called a press conference to announce that two unidentified brands of cosmetic talc appeared to contain asbestos. He asked New Yorkers to stop using talc-based powders. Johnson & Johnson promptly issued a statement: “Our fifty years of research knowledge in this area indicates that there is no asbestos contained in the powder manufactured by Johnson & Johnson.”
Ten days later, on July 8, 1971, a delegation of J&J scientists met privately with FDA officials. The J&J team told the agency that company tests showed Baby Powder contained “only minor amounts (below 1%) of tremolite and actinolite, or in other words less than 1%, if any, asbestos particles.”
The public statement said no asbestos. The private disclosure to the FDA said less than 1 percent. Both were issued the same month.
This pattern continued for decades. In November 1971, Langer wrote to J&J confirming he had found asbestos in company samples: “We also observed trace amounts of chrysotile asbestos.” The company had no interest in Langer publishing these findings and seriously discouraged such a step. Years later, a company representative acknowledged in court testimony that statements made under oath by a top company executive—statements identical to those made by other company executives and lawyers—that asbestos has never been found in Baby Powder were false.
The Vanishing Files
In 1979, Thomas Howard Westfall, a worker at Uniroyal Tire’s plant in Providence, Rhode Island, filed suit against Johnson & Johnson’s talc subsidiary. He believed his mesothelioma resulted from clouds of talc at his plant, all sourced from a Vermont mine J&J had once owned.
Engelhard, which had purchased the mine from J&J in 1966, had been receiving warnings for years. Beginning in late January 1979, the company sent weekly talc samples to the Georgia Institute of Technology, which had one of the most sensitive labs in the country. Initial results were worrisome enough that the company kept sending samples for fifteen weeks straight. Every single one was positive for asbestos. A study co-sponsored by Harvard University and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found that between 1970 and 1978, Engelhard’s miners lost significant lung function well beyond what would have been expected from the effects of cigarette smoking and age-related decline.
Westfall’s lawyer hired a geology professor from the University of Vermont to conduct independent tests. Engelhard refused to allow the geologist to enter the premises. The professor took samples from the exterior. He found significant asbestos contamination.
The lawyer subpoenaed Glenn Hemstock, Engelhard’s research director. In a deposition in January 1983, Westfall’s lawyer walked through fifty-one separate documents. Many clearly demonstrated that the company’s talc had far more than trace quantities of asbestos. Hemstock grudgingly but repeatedly confirmed the contamination. The documents and his sworn statements proved that talc from a mine J&J had once owned and that Engelhard still used was thoroughly contaminated, that Engelhard knew about this contamination, and that both companies had lied about it repeatedly.
A year earlier, the Manville Corporation—the nation’s largest asbestos company—had filed for bankruptcy protection after facing sixteen thousand lawsuits. Manville had $2.2 billion in revenues and was 181st on the Fortune 500 list. Johnson & Johnson had $5.4 billion in revenue and was 68th. If Hemstock’s deposition and the documents he reviewed ever became public, the litigation might destroy both companies.
Engelhard and J&J settled the Westfall case by paying an undisclosed sum. The attorneys demanded confidentiality and the return of all evidence proving asbestos contamination. The University of Vermont geologist turned over his original notes, photomicrographs, and talc samples. Engelhard stopped selling talc and closed its Vermont mine, which filled up with water, making subsequent testing impossible.
Engelhard issued the first document-purge memorandum in its history, instructing employees to carefully comb through their files, retrieve anything involving talc, and give them to the legal department. “It is the policy of Engelhard Corporation to avoid the undue accumulation of documents that are no longer likely to be needed in our business operations,” the purge memo stated. Pages in bound laboratory notebooks that mentioned talc had to be carefully and painstakingly ripped or sliced out. The documents were collected by Engelhard’s lawyers and sent to a secret storage facility, where they would remain largely forgotten for decades.
Johnson & Johnson then helped Engelhard replace its real records with false ones, creating affidavits swearing that asbestos had never been found in the Johnson mine or any other talc mine owned by them. Roger N. Miller, president of J&J’s talc subsidiary, signed such false affidavits.
Engelhard’s and J&J’s lawyers sent letters to lawyers for tire workers and other plaintiffs falsely declaring that all talc from the companies’ mines had always proven to be asbestos-free and that there was no evidence suggesting otherwise. The letters insisted that plaintiffs drop their litigation. John Beidler, J&J’s in-house lawyer, who was in the room for the first day of Hemstock’s deposition, signed similar letters. Plaintiffs’ attorneys who persisted were threatened with sanctions.
The Regulator’s Absence
The FDA’s cosmetics office has been perennially starved of resources. The agency lacks the legal authority to require safety testing of cosmetics before they reach the market. In Congressional testimony, officials admitted they didn’t know how many different over-the-counter drug and cosmetic brands were marketed—they estimated three hundred thousand—or how many packages were sold annually. That was why the FDA had no systematic process for identifying safety problems until they became crises. When citizen petitions asking for cancer warnings on talc products arrived in 1994 and 2008, the FDA told the Cancer Prevention Coalition it couldn’t respond “because of the limited availability of resources and other agency priorities.”
The agency’s relationship with J&J extended beyond passive neglect. In 2012, J&J’s chief executive used his industry and political connections to save hundreds of FDA jobs during a budget crisis—a favor that shaped the agency’s subsequent behavior.
The agency’s relationship with J&J extended beyond passive neglect. In 1994, the FDA co-sponsored a conference titled “Talc: Consumer Uses and Health Perspectives.” The other co-sponsor was the International Society of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, which received grants from J&J and the cosmetics trade association. The journal of this organization was financed in part by the tobacco, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries.
The trade association sent the ISRTP names of participants it wanted to attend the talc symposium. Most came from industry. Nine of the fourteen academics invited served as talc industry consultants but did not disclose these financial ties. In 2018, the FDA held another such conference, and again the participants were mostly those with industry ties. Experts not associated with industry who asked the FDA if they could attend were told they could not.
In late 2013, J&J lost its first Baby Powder cancer lawsuit in federal court in South Dakota. Six months later, the FDA issued denials for both the 1994 and 2008 citizen petitions seeking cancer warnings. The agency said the growing mountain of epidemiological data couldn’t be used to prove a link between talc and ovarian cancer because none of the published studies had focused exclusively on women who had begun using talc only after 1976, when the FDA said manufacturers began eliminating asbestos from their products.
“Thus, while it has been reported in the past that cosmetic talc has been contaminated with asbestos, it has been also reported that asbestos-free talc deposits do exist,” the FDA wrote, without specifying where such deposits could be found, how the agency knew they were asbestos-free, or how it was sure that talc-containing products were exclusively sourced from them.
The FDA’s 2014 talc statements were part of a long pattern in which the agency issued statements tailor-made to help J&J fend off legal claims. Republican administrations are often accused of being too cozy with corporate interests. The FDA’s petition denials took place during the administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat.
Dr. Alfred Wehner, a Johnson & Johnson consultant, described multiple statements made in defense of talc to be “outright false” and inaccurate in a letter to a top company executive: “At [the] time there had been about 9 studies (more by now) published in the open literature that did show a statistically significant association between hygienic talc use and ovarian cancer. Anybody who denies this risks that the talc industry will be perceived by the public like it perceives the cigarette industry: denying the obvious in the face of all evidence to the contrary.”
The Shield of Mythology
In September 1982, cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules killed seven people in the Chicago area. Johnson & Johnson’s response—withdrawing thirty-one million bottles at a cost of $100 million and pioneering tamper-resistant packaging—became legendary. A Harvard Business School case study declared it the most ethical, honest, and effective crisis reaction in American corporate history. James Burke, the CEO who led the response, was elected to the National Business Hall of Fame. Fortune magazine named him one of the ten greatest chief executives of all time. President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The Tylenol response created a halo that would prove durable. Harvard Business School case studies piled up declaring J&J a capitalist’s nirvana. Inside the company, a belief solidified that Johnson & Johnson was a uniquely beneficial force for good in the world. Every new employee was told about the 1982 case. The official story became something of a prayer.
Company surveys found that the scent of Johnson’s Baby Powder was among the most recognizable in the world, immediately evoking babies, mothers, and innocence. Smells feed directly into the brain’s limbic system, the ancient seat of human emotion. For generations, much of the American population was implanted in the womb and throughout infancy with associations linking Johnson & Johnson with love, happiness, trust, and intimacy—a public relations contrivance of unrivaled power and perseverance.
This reputation became a resource for misconduct rather than a constraint on it. Meanwhile, the company’s stable of baby products gave J&J a level of emotional trust from consumers that was all but impossible to degrade. No matter what executives did or to what charges they pleaded guilty, consumers, doctors, business professors, and legislators continued to shower them with admiration and affection. They could do almost anything, it seemed, and still be admired. Bad behavior without consequence can be deeply corrupting.
So instead of the unknowing slide into problematic behavior that had characterized earlier decades, Johnson & Johnson’s executives began taking what they must have known were much more ethically problematic steps to hide serious problems. In the 1980s, the company’s lawyers started hiding documents. Executives began lying under oath. Studies linking chronic talc usage with elevated cancer rates made clear that Johnson’s Baby Powder had to change, but executives instead worked to discredit the researchers.
In August 1982, three weeks after Dr. Daniel W. Cramer published a study in Cancer concluding that women who dusted their crotch with talc had a 92 percent increased risk of ovarian cancer, Johnson & Johnson representatives described his research as “inconclusive” in the press. Privately, executives were furious. Dr. Bruce Semple, a company executive, traveled to Boston to persuade Cramer that he’d made mistakes in his research. As an internal J&J memo stated, Cramer “stood by his conclusion that talc usage may be associated with ovarian cancer.” However, “He agreed not to make further public statements or grant interviews on this study.”
The Body Count
The mechanism by which talc causes ovarian cancer is disputed. Dr. Cramer, the Harvard researcher, believes talc particles enter the vaginal canals of women who dust themselves and then migrate to the ovaries, which respond by attacking the dust particles in a way that can precipitate cancer. Other scientists argue that talc’s association with ovarian cancer results from the inhalation of small amounts of asbestos. The evidence that inhaled asbestos can cause ovarian cancer is robust enough to be accepted even by Johnson & Johnson. In 1960, a doctor at the London Hospital noticed that women with asbestosis seemed to suffer abdominal cancer at exceedingly high rates. Of twenty-three women with asbestosis treated at the hospital, nine had died of what may have been ovarian cancer.
Whatever the mechanism, the epidemiological evidence accumulated for decades. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer examined the evidence and concluded that women who regularly dusted their vaginal areas with talc had a 30 percent to 60 percent greater risk of ovarian cancer than those who didn’t. IARC is widely regarded as the last word on carcinogenicity.
Roberta Ness, former dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health and former president of the American Epidemiological Society, has testified that a middle ground among the many studies suggests that Johnson’s Baby Powder contributes to about 2,500 women in the United States being diagnosed with ovarian cancer every year and 1,500 dying. Asbestos is linked to about forty thousand cancer deaths in the United States every year—about the same toll as breast cancer. Half of American women reported frequent use of talc in their crotch area, according to company surveys.
As Cramer pointed out, whether talcum powder is dangerous because it contains small amounts of asbestos or because it contains large amounts of talc ultimately shouldn’t make a difference in women’s decision to use it as a cosmetic. Given that talc has no medical benefit, even a hint of risk is unacceptable.
In 1989, J&J sold its talc subsidiary. Instead of taking the opportunity to transition Johnson’s Baby Powder entirely to cornstarch as other giants like Pfizer were doing, the company kept buying and using talc. By 1989, asbestos had become radioactive in American life, and no American mother would sprinkle her baby with anything that had even the remotest chance of containing it. Johnson’s Baby Powder was almost unique among consumer products in its continued use of talc.
In 2004, Imerys, J&J’s talc supplier, began placing a cancer warning on every sack of talc delivered to Johnson & Johnson after the World Health Organization announced it had placed talc on its list of possible carcinogens. Imerys executives quietly put together a proposal that the industry voluntarily phase out talc-based baby powders and dusting powders that women use on their genitals. The company never followed through.
In 2008, J&J’s Global Design Strategy Team examined the issue. Todd True, a team member, noted that “Johnson’s Baby Powder is not recommended for use on babies at all!!” He acknowledged that the proposal was controversial but wrote that almost every other baby powder manufacturer had long since abandoned talcum powder and moved to cornstarch.
Other team members noted that trying to educate women about the differences between talc and cornstarch might open a can of worms. Yes, the company had a safe substitute that to many users is indistinguishable from the original. But could the company suddenly admit that talc was problematic around babies? True’s proposals were shelved.
The Inadequacy of Courts
In July 2018, attorney Mark Lanier opened his case against Johnson & Johnson in a St. Louis courtroom representing twenty-two women with ovarian cancer. He walked through documents proving J&J’s malfeasance, then warned the jury not to believe much of what the company’s lawyers would say.
The most remarkable aspect of Johnson & Johnson’s defense was the things its lawyers didn’t offer the jury. Not a single academic asbestos expert appeared on behalf of the company. J&J has paid consultants in nearly every major academic medical center in the country. That not a single one could adequately defend J&J under threat of perjury was telling. One of the company’s clinical experts declared that asbestos doesn’t cause ovarian cancer. Two others said that only heavy occupational exposure can lead to ovarian cancer. Both claims had been contradicted by decades of research. One of the company’s experts made so many misstatements that Lanier, fearing his cross-examination bordered on being cruel, finally softened. “You got selected—and this just wasn’t your area of research before you got hired to do this, was it?” he asked gently. “No,” the expert admitted.
The only asbestos expert the company produced was a geologist from RJ Lee, a for-profit testing firm whose business largely revolves around litigation defense for asbestos companies. He claimed that asbestos fibers must be a certain shape to be considered real asbestos—a definition so exclusionary that it would be like defining a car as only one specific model from one specific year. But even this expert admitted under cross-examination that when J&J’s lawyer had declared that the company’s mines had always proven to be free of asbestos, “that claim was false.”
The jury awarded $4.14 billion in punitive damages—one of the biggest civil judgments in history. An appeals court reduced the award to $2.1 billion but ruled that significant punitive damages were warranted because “Plaintiffs proved with convincing clarity that Defendants engaged in outrageous conduct because of an evil motive or reckless indifference.” Johnson & Johnson appealed to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. The company transferred $2.5 billion to the plaintiffs’ account.
The verdict did not create systemic change. More than sixty thousand women have sued, and perhaps as many as twenty thousand more may do so annually for decades. Nearly all of these cases are individual claims that must be fought separately because no judge has approved a class-action lawsuit. A series of business-friendly Supreme Court rulings have made such cases exceptionally rare.
J&J’s chairman, Alex Gorsky, took advantage of an unusual Texas law to transfer the company’s Baby Powder liabilities into a subsidiary called LTL Management, put a $2 billion trust fund into the company, and then declared LTL bankrupt. Known as “the Texas two-step,” the maneuver depended on a sympathetic bankruptcy judge agreeing up front how much women who had been sickened by Baby Powder could split among themselves in perpetuity—no punitive damages, no outraged juries, no billion-dollar verdicts.
A federal appeals court threw out the bankruptcy filing in January 2023, declaring the company had no legitimate claim to Chapter 11 protection because it didn’t face financial distress. J&J had a market capitalization exceeding $400 billion.
Between 2010 and 2021, J&J spent $25 billion on litigation. The company sued doctors who published studies linking talc-based products and cancer. In 2019, plaintiffs’ attorneys returned to a hotel in New Brunswick to find their room keys no longer functioned after J&J instructed the hotel manager to evict them. Outside legal experts called the company’s tactics all but unprecedented.
What Survives
In November 2021, Johnson & Johnson announced it would expel its entire consumer products portfolio—including Johnson’s Baby Powder, Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, Tylenol, Listerine, Neutrogena, Aveeno, Band-Aids, and Motrin—into a separate corporation called Kenvue Inc. On May 4, 2023, Kenvue went public and raised $3.8 billion in the largest initial public offering in eighteen months.
Even after the spin-off, J&J remains the largest and most diversified healthcare conglomerate in the world and among the most profitable companies of any kind. Its name remains one of the most admired and valuable brands in history. The company will very likely continue successfully recruiting top candidates at the nation’s best business schools because every student is still taught that Johnson & Johnson’s response to the 1982 poisoning case was exemplary.
By maintaining its medical products businesses, the company remains among the largest funders in the world of the FDA, academic medical centers, and white-shoe corporate law firms—ensuring ongoing regulatory servility, professorial obsequiousness, and prosecutorial pusillanimity.
The mechanisms that enabled decades of corporate killing remain intact. Industry designs its own testing standards. Regulatory agencies lack resources and authority. Ethical mythology shields ongoing misconduct. Courts process individual claims slowly while corporations outlast plaintiffs and their lawyers. Document destruction goes unpunished. Perjury results in no criminal charges. The cost of killing consumers becomes a line item, a financial penalty the company can withstand.
The iconic American company that for decades sold prescription medicines, medical devices, and such beloved brands as Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, Tylenol, and Aveeno died in 2023. But the power, privilege, and mythology that have long protected its executives and shareholders from ever paying truly significant penalties for their myriad misdeeds? Those continue to endure.
The asbestos in Johnson’s Baby Powder was not an aberration. It was the system working as designed.
References
Primary Source
Harris, Gardiner. No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson. Penguin Random House, 2025.
Key Documents and Depositions Cited in Harris
Battelle Memorial Institute analysis of J&J talc (1958)
Ashton, William. Memorandum on talc impurities (November 1, 1967)
Thompson, T. M. Memorandum on tremolite and litigation risk (1968)
Wenninger, John. FDA memorandum on J&J meeting, “Asbestos Particles in Talc” (July 8, 1971)
Hemstock, Glenn A. Depositions (March 16, 1983; May 9, 2012; May 29, 2012)
Hopkins, John. Trial testimony, Barden v. Brenntag North America et al. (July 23, 2019)
Ingham et al. v. Johnson & Johnson. Trial transcripts (June–July 2018)
Kimberlee Williams v. BASF. Decision on appeal (September 3, 2014)
Studies and Reports
Cramer, D. W., et al. “Ovarian Cancer and Talc: A Case-Control Study.” Cancer 50, no. 2 (July 15, 1982): 372–76.
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Arsenic, Metals, Fibres and Dusts. IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, Volume 100C. 2012.
Rohl, A. N., et al. “Consumer Talcums and Powders: Mineral and Chemical Characterization.” Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health 2, no. 2 (1976): 255–84.
Journalism
Girion, Lisa. “Johnson & Johnson Knew for Decades That Asbestos Lurked in Its Baby Powder.” Reuters, December 14, 2018.
Feeley, Jef. “BASF, Cahill Law Firm to Pay $72.5 Million in Talc-Scam Deal.” Bloomberg News, July 23, 2020.
Many original documents referenced in this essay are available at https://no-more-tears.org, a repository maintained in connection with Harris’s book.
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"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a Trout in the milk" - Henry David Thoreau - (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862)
I just finished reading the book myself. How on earth are these people still walking free? They are complicit in the deaths of thousands, lock them up!