Philadelphia Jury Awards $200 Million to Two Women for Fen-Phen Heart-Valve Damage in Paul v. Wyeth

In 1997, the FDA asked Wyeth to pull its diet drugs Pondimin and Redux from the market after mounting evidence showed the drugs could scar and stiffen heart valves. Millions of Americans had already taken the combination popularly known as fen-phen. For many of them, the harm had already been done, and no withdrawal notice could undo it.

Wyeth negotiated a $3.75 billion national class-action settlement in 1999, but some former users chose to opt out and pursue individual trials. By 2005, a rotating docket of those cases was being tried in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, which had become the central forum for fen-phen litigation across the country. The plaintiffs in Paul et al. v. Wyeth were two women who said they had developed heart-valve damage after taking Wyeth's drugs and who were seeking full compensation outside the class settlement.

Steve Kherkher, then a partner at Williams Bailey Law Firm (the Houston firm that later became Kherkher Garcia), tried the case on their behalf. The evidence he presented tracked the same core theory that had run through the fen-phen docket for years: Wyeth had internal data linking the drugs to valve disease well before the 1997 withdrawal and had marketed them without adequate warning. In May 2005, the jury returned verdicts of $100 million for each of the two plaintiffs, a combined $200 million award composed entirely of actual damages, with no punitive component.

Wyeth moved for a mistrial. The trial court granted post-trial relief, setting aside the jury's $200 million verdict. The case subsequently settled on confidential terms, for an amount the parties did not disclose publicly, described in press coverage at the time as 'far less' than the jury had awarded.

Kherkher went on to try additional fen-phen cases in Philadelphia through the end of 2005. When a November jury returned a defense verdict in a separate case, he told a Bloomberg News reporter: 'We won $200 million and we lost this one. So what are you going to do? Get back on your horse and that's what we'll do.' The firm represented more than 6,200 fen-phen claimants in courts across the country during that period.