Philadelphia Jury Hits J&J's Ethicon With $80 Million Over Eroded Prolift Mesh

Patricia Mesigian was 75 and living in Media, a suburb southwest of Philadelphia, when her case reached trial. In 2008 she had received Ethicon's Prolift, a transvaginal mesh device meant to hold pelvic organs in place after prolapse. Ethicon is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. The implant did not do what it promised. The polypropylene mesh eroded inside her body and left her with pelvic pain, infection, inflammation, and scar tissue. A series of follow-up surgeries failed to fix the problem.

Prolift had been sold for years before Johnson & Johnson pulled it from the market in 2012. By the time Mesigian went to trial, the device had already drawn thousands of injury claims from women who said it was built to fail and that the company never told them how dangerous it could be.

Kline & Specter tried the case in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, with Thomas R. Kline leading the plaintiff's side. The argument stayed on the product. The firm told the jury that the Prolift was defectively designed and that Johnson & Johnson and Ethicon had failed to warn women and their surgeons about the risks that came with it. After hearing the evidence, the jury deliberated for two days.

On May 17, 2019, the jury found the Prolift defective and agreed that the company had not given an adequate warning. It returned $80 million: $30 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages. The punitive figure was the portion meant to punish the company for its conduct rather than repay Mesigian's losses. In a statement, Kline said the award recognized "not only the severity of the injury but the abhorrence of the conduct" by Ethicon.

The verdict came less than a month after a separate Philadelphia jury hit Ethicon with $120 million in another mesh case. Mesigian's was the eighth time a Philadelphia court had sided with a woman suing Ethicon over its mesh, and it pushed the running total of those judgments past $346 million.

Ethicon said the verdict was inconsistent with the science and with the company's actions, and it said it would appeal. The amount the jury announced on May 17, 2019 was $80 million.