Jury awards $289 million in Monsanto pesticide cancer suit

(Image credit: John Thys/Getty Images)

A jury on Friday awarded $289 million to Dewayne Johnson, a man who sued agribusiness giant Monsanto alleging their Roundup herbicide product caused his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Johnson, a former school groundskeeper, is the first to go to trial with this claim, but his case is one of thousands alleging a link between Roundup and cancer. "I'm glad to be here to be able to help in a cause that's way bigger than me," Johnson said. He thanked the jurors, his lawyers, and his family "from the bottom of my heart."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.