Johnson & Johnson just agreed to its biggest talc payout to date. The company will pay $5.5 billion to settle tens of thousands of lawsuits over its talcum powder, legal trackers monitoring the case reported in July 2026. Of that, $3 billion could go out to victims as early as 2027.
The numbers behind this fight are hard to ignore. Court records put the total lawsuits filed against J&J in the US at over 90,000. Women and families behind these cases say Johnson’s Baby Powder and Shower to Shower were laced with asbestos for decades, and that long-term use led to ovarian cancer and mesothelioma. The verdicts have been anything but consistent. One Los Angeles jury handed down $32 million in June. A separate California jury went far bigger just days later, ordering $966 million — though a judge later threw out most of the punitive damages. Not to be outdone, an Illinois appeals court upheld a $45 million payout earlier this month.
J&J has fought back hard. Three attempts to settle the litigation through bankruptcy have collapsed, the latest rejected by a US bankruptcy judge in March 2025. The company has also asked a federal court to throw out thousands of pending cases after plaintiffs’ lawyers withdrew two expert witnesses. J&J maintains its talc has always been safe and asbestos-free.
So where does India fit in?
India’s role in this saga is largely history now. J&J made the call back in 2022 — talc-based baby powder would disappear everywhere, India included, by 2023, with cornstarch taking its place. And it wasn’t some sudden decision out of the blue. Indian regulators had been circling the product for years. In 2018, drug authorities collected samples from J&J plants across nine Indian cities after a Reuters investigation raised asbestos concerns. Then in 2022, Maharashtra’s FDA cancelled J&J’s manufacturing licence at its Mulund plant, after baby powder samples from Pune and Nashik failed a pH test.
J&J challenged that order in court. Eventually, the Bombay High Court sided with J&J. The bench pulled up Maharashtra’s FDA for taking too long to run its tests and said cancelling the licence outright was an overreach.
But by the time that courtroom drama settled down, it hardly mattered anymore — the talc formula was already gone, replaced on shelves before the ruling even landed. Talc-based Johnson’s Baby Powder is no longer manufactured or sold anywhere in the world today, India included.
So while American courtrooms keep churning out fresh verdicts and multi-billion-dollar settlements over decades-old talc use, Indian consumers today are buying a completely different product. The ongoing US litigation is unlikely to bring talc powder back to Indian shelves — the global shift to cornstarch was a business call, not a regulation specific to India.