J&J Is Waiting For You To Die: Their Ghoul Defense

For 11 years, Johnson & Johnson has been playing out what's called the ghoul defense in the legal business. That's where you delay paying people money, that they should be paid for the injury and suffering that you've caused them, and you wait until they die. Mike Papantonio is joined by attorney Andy Birchfield to explain what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

For 11 years, Johnson & Johnson has been playing out what's called the ghoul defense in the legal business. That's where you delay paying people money, that they should be paid for the injury and suffering that you've caused them, and you wait until they die. Here's why. Because if you wait long enough and they die, the case is worth only about 25% of what it would be when they're alive. And that's what this company's been doing for 11 years, along with some really, really bad things. I've got Andy Birchfield with me today, and Andy is the person that for 11 years, has been fighting these thugs. And I wanted to bring him on and tell you just how ugly this story is. Andy, you've heard me talk about the ghoul defense. You certainly are aware of it. We've seen other companies do it. The asbestos industry, for example, was known for the ghoul defense. That's what they're doing here, isn't it? It's one of the things they're doing.

Absolutely. They've taken the tobacco playbook, war of attrition, just like you described, Pap. But they are trying, J&J is trying to rewrite that last chapter. In the tobacco industry, asbestos industry, they were successful in doing that. This scorched earth war of attrition. They were able to do that for a long time. Then it caught up with them. I mean, the tobacco industry ended up with over a $200 billion settlement.

This is something that, it is kind of thing they teach in MBA school. Now, they may not call it the ghoul defense. But when the MBA student is learning about how do you do these ugly little things, this is one of the things you do. And it wouldn't surprise me that if they, if Johnson & Johnson gets away with this, they'll have a whole course on how to go about doing this. They've already been teaching it. First of all, I think the worst thing about it, and people miss in here, is how bad the economic damages are for somebody along with the fact they're gonna lose their life, just having to fight to stay alive, the economics of that, somebody who has ovarian cancer. Talk about that a little bit.

Pap, that's one of the most egregious aspects of this. J&J, they're filing bankruptcy and they're doing it, they're using it as a weapon. But so many of the families of their victims are having to go into bankruptcy in a legitimate way because of just the enormous medical costs that are involved here. So, on the average.

I've seen the medical cost being as high as a million and a half dollars a year.

Oh, yeah.

That's just to stay alive. That doesn't mean, hey, we're gonna cure you. That's just so mommy and sister, they can stay alive. Isn't that, is that accurate?

Yeah. And so, yes, the medical costs can often exceed a million dollars, even a million and a half, close to $2 million. But one of the things that we have seen, and we've had experts look at, okay, what is the cost? The real cost? And if you have someone that is diagnosed at stage three or stage four, those medical costs typically exceed a million dollars. But if you have someone that's diagnosed later in life in their seventies or eighties, and they are stage one, that can be 30, $40,000. But the weighted average across the entire spectrum. Someone that's diagnosed at early age, at stage four, to someone that's diagnosed late in life at a stage one, the weighted average is over $220,000 just for the medical cost.

Wow. Okay. So here you have lawyers that have bought into the idea of Johnson. They're just, they're pals. They're friends with Johnson & Johnson. They're plaintiff's lawyers who do what we do and they've been made a promise that if you'll go along with this.