A new Roundup lawsuit indicates that a former landscaper developed fatal lymphoma from regular exposure to the popular weed killer and paid for Monsanto concealing Roundup’s cancer risks with his life.
The deceased landscaper’s wife, Ellen Scotto, filed the complaint April 4 in the Supreme Court of New York for Nassau County. As the administrator of her late husband’s estate, Scotto is pursuing justice for Monsanto prioritizing profits over people.
According to Scotto’s claim, her husband, Raymond Scotto, began using Roundup around 1980 during his work as a landscaper. Scotto alleges that exposure to the glyphosate-based herbicide resulted in her husband developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in March 2015. He received his diagnosis mere months after the World health Organization’s International Agency on Cancer (IARC) categorized glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. Raymond Scott succumbed to the fatal lymphoma May 17, 2017.
Like thousands of other plaintiffs with similar claims pending nationwide, Scotto asserts that Monsanto knew for years that the weed killer could cause fatal lymphoma but actively concealed this and even influenced regulators and scientific studies to prevent regulatory action regarding Roundup’s patently dangerous nature.
“Glyphosate, and Defendant’s Roundup products in particular, have long been associated with serious side effects and many regulatory agencies around the globe have banned or are currently banning the use of glyphosate herbicide products,” the lawsuit notes. “Defendant’s statements proclaiming the safety of Roundup and disregarding its dangers misled Plaintiff.”
Roundup Fatal Lymphoma Litigation
Currently, Bayer and its Monsanto subsidiary are facing more than 11,000 Roundup lawsuits nationwide. The manufacturers have already been slammed with a series of crippling verdicts in early trials. This includes a $78 million judgement this past August in California state court for a former school groundskeeper dying from fatal lymphoma and an $80 million verdict this past month in the first federal bellwether trial.
Due to the striking similarities in the lawsuits in federal District Courts nationwide, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) centralized the litigation to circumvent conflicting pretrial rulings and schedules that tend to hold up these types of complex litigations. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria is presiding over the entirety of the federal litigation in the Northern District of California. The federal litigation has scheduled a series of early trial dates to help parties gauge how juries may respond to evidence and testimony that appears throughout the litigation.
