Philadelphia Jury Awards $120 Million Against J&J's Ethicon Over Eroded Pelvic Mesh

Susan McFarland, a 68-year-old from Altoona, received a Gynecare TVT-O mesh implant in 2008 to treat urinary incontinence. The TVT-O was one of Ethicon's tension-free vaginal tape slings, a permanent strip of polypropylene meant to support the urethra. Ethicon is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. In McFarland's case the mesh did not stay where surgeons placed it. It eroded into the wall of her vagina, and a revision surgery in 2009 failed to undo the damage. She was left with pelvic and groin pain, chronic urinary tract infections, and pain during intercourse, while the incontinence the implant was supposed to fix never went away. A decade after the operation, she was still in pain.

Kline & Specter brought the case to trial in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. It was the second attempt, since an earlier trial had ended in a hung jury in September 2018. Over three weeks, lead counsel Tracie Palmer, joined by Braden Lepisto, argued that Ethicon had designed the TVT-O so that it predictably eroded and contracted once inside the body, and that the company had failed to warn women and their surgeons about those risks. The case stayed fixed on the product rather than on the surgery that placed it. The jury found that Ethicon had been negligent in designing the device. It deliberated about three hours.

On April 24, 2019, the jury returned $120 million: $20 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages. Kline & Specter described it as the largest pelvic-mesh verdict reached to that point, more than double the roughly $57 million that had stood as the largest such award in Philadelphia. Mindy Tinsley, a spokeswoman for Ethicon, said the company would appeal.

The result followed a clear pattern. Before McFarland, Kline & Specter had won the previous six Philadelphia transvaginal mesh trials, verdicts that together came to $146 million and included awards of $57.1 million and, that February, $41 million. The February award had come just two months earlier, also in Philadelphia. Hers was the seventh. Counting it, the firm's Philadelphia mesh verdicts added up to $266 million.