Kimberly-Clark sued for allegedly lying about the fusibility of its moist wipes

Kimberly-Clark collected a price premium from consumers for 14 years by calling their wipes “flushable”… and when they finally got caught, their lawyers walked away with three times more money than the people whose pipes were damaged.

The Label Was a Lie. The Damage Was Real.

Kimberly-Clark Corporation sold moist bathroom wipes under the “flushable” label to consumers across the United States from 2008 through 2022. Two consumers, Gladys Honigman and D. Joseph Kurtz, filed class action lawsuits alleging the company falsely advertised those products. Their core claim was straightforward: the wipes were not actually flushable, the label was deceptive, and people paid more money for a product that caused real harm.

According to the court record, purchasers paid a price premium for those wipes — meaning Kimberly-Clark charged more because of the “flushable” designation. People trusted the label, flushed the wipes, and in many cases experienced plumbing damage as a direct result. This was not a fringe complaint from a handful of angry customers. This was a company-wide, label-wide, product-wide practice spanning one and a half decades.

The class was defined as every person over the age of 18 who purchased these wipes for personal use between 2008 and 2022. That is fourteen years of consumers being charged a premium for a lie printed on a package they trusted in one of the most private rooms of their homes.

The Settlement Numbers Tell the Real Story

After years of litigation, the parties reached a settlement in 2022. Kimberly-Clark agreed to set aside up to $20 million (enough to cover a year’s worth of rent for roughly 556 working families) for class compensation. Class members could claim up to $50.60 with a receipt or up to $7.00 without one. The company separately agreed to pay attorney’s fees of up to $4.1 million (enough to fully fund a small community health clinic for two years), kept entirely separate from the compensation pool.

By the claim deadline, class members had filed for just under $1 million total (still enough to give roughly 143 families one month of rent relief). The other $19 million (enough to pay the annual salary of 380 median American workers) reverted directly back to Kimberly-Clark. The company that deceived consumers for fourteen years got to keep almost all the money it had promised to pay them.

Meanwhile, class counsel requested $3.9 million in attorney’s fees (enough to fully pay off the student loans of roughly 130 average borrowers). The district court reduced that to approximately $3.1 million (still more than three times the total amount ordinary consumers actually received). That ratio was so stark it prompted a class member named Theodore Frank to formally object to the settlement’s fairness.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What the Dollar Figures Can’t Measure

There is a specific kind of betrayal that happens in a bathroom. It is one of the few genuinely private spaces most people have. Kimberly-Clark chose that space to run a lie. Consumers reached for a product, read the label, and made a reasonable, trust-based decision to flush those wipes down their toilets. That trust was a profit center for Kimberly-Clark for fourteen straight years.

The court record confirms that the “flushable” label caused purchasers to flush the wipes, resulting in plumbing damage. Plumbing damage is not an abstraction. It means blocked pipes. It means flooded bathrooms or burst drains. It means emergency plumber calls that renters, working-class homeowners, and people on fixed incomes could not easily afford. For people in apartment buildings, it could mean damage to shared infrastructure and escalating conflicts with landlords. The company collected its premium and left ordinary people holding the repair bill.

The settlement structure compounded the original harm. Class members who wanted compensation had to navigate a claims process, track down receipts for something they bought in a grocery store years ago, and file paperwork to receive a maximum of $50.60 with proof of purchase or $7.00 without a receipt. Seven dollars. For plumbing damage caused by a corporation’s deliberate false advertising. The court record notes the claims rate was so low that of the $20 million set aside, class members claimed less than $1 million total.

The result of that low claims rate was not that Kimberly-Clark paid less to settle. The result was that Kimberly-Clark kept the $19 million in unclaimed funds (enough to cover a full year of groceries for over 12,000 average American households). A company that deceived consumers for fourteen years, got sued, agreed to a settlement, and then got to pocket nearly all the money when people didn’t jump through enough hoops to claim their $7. That is the structure of this deal. That is what “settlement” looked like for Kimberly-Clark’s customers.

Legal Receipts: The Court’s Own Words

The System Admitted It Exists to Protect People Like You

“Absent class members can certainly stand to benefit from the class actions waged in their name, but they also are at risk of being unfairly treated as a result of the payout to others. For this reason, courts must act as a ‘protector of the rights of the class,’ scrutinizing class action settlements to ensure that absent class members and their claims are not shortchanged or undercut.” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Kurtz v. Kimberly-Clark Corp., July 1, 2025 (quoting In re Agent Orange Prod. Liab. Litig., 1987)

The Court Named the Exact Scam That Happened Here

“One of the major risks of class action settlements is that class counsel may undervalue the class’s claims in exchange for a higher attorney’s fee, or in order to collect a fee more quickly. ‘[T]he court’s role as fiduciary is primarily to ensure that the class’s own agents — its class representatives and class counsel — have not sold out its interests in settling the case.'” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Kurtz v. Kimberly-Clark Corp., July 1, 2025 (quoting Newberg and Rubenstein on Class Actions)

The Lower Court Rejected the Original Fee Request as Obscene

“The district court here, in its Rule 23(h) analysis, rejected class counsel’s initial request for $3.9 million in attorney’s fees as ‘unreasonable under the circumstances,’ explaining that this requested award would be ‘approximately 77.5% of the Settlement’s total value.'” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Kurtz v. Kimberly-Clark Corp., July 1, 2025

The Fee Fund “Separation” Was a Legal Fiction

“In any case, formal segregation tells us little of the practical reality of the settlement negotiations. Attorney’s fees and class recovery are inevitably intertwined: parties often negotiate the two simultaneously, and defendants, who pay both fees and class recovery, must be expected to think of the two payments in tandem as they negotiate. A defendant’s willingness to pay a high or low fee will be impacted by what it anticipates paying out to the class and vice versa.” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Kurtz v. Kimberly-Clark Corp., July 1, 2025

Congress Changed the Rules Specifically to Stop This

“Moses explained that such review of attorney’s fees was intended to ‘prevent[] unscrupulous counsel from quickly settling a class’s claims to cut a check.’ A ‘symbiotic review of proposed relief and attorneys’ fees’ helps achieve that purpose.” — Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Kurtz v. Kimberly-Clark Corp., July 1, 2025 (quoting Moses v. New York Times Co., 2023)

Societal Impact: This Wasn’t Isolated Harm

Economic Inequality: A Premium on a Lie, Absorbed by Ordinary Households

The Kimberly-Clark case is a direct, documented example of how corporations extract money from working people through deceptive labeling. The court record establishes that consumers paid a price premium specifically because of the “flushable” designation. That premium, multiplied across millions of purchases over fourteen years, represents a wealth transfer from ordinary households to Kimberly-Clark’s balance sheet.

The settlement structure then reproduced that inequality at the resolution stage. The people who could claim the most compensation were those who had kept grocery receipts for up to fourteen years. The people least likely to have kept those receipts are renters, lower-income households, and people who shop at discount stores without digital purchase tracking. The $7.00 no-receipt cap functionally told the most economically vulnerable class members their claim was worth less than a fast food combo meal.

The reversal of $19 million back to Kimberly-Clark (enough to fund school meal programs for roughly 5,700 kids for a full year) was the final economic injury. Class action settlements are supposed to deter corporations from repeating harmful conduct. A settlement structure where the corporation keeps 95 cents of every dollar it originally set aside does not deter anything. It makes wrongdoing look affordable.

Public Health: Infrastructure Harm at Scale

The court record confirms that consumers flushed these wipes because they were told they were flushable, and that this caused plumbing damage. Plumbing damage at scale is a public health concern. Non-flushable wipes are a documented cause of sewer blockages, pipe backups, and what water utilities call “fatbergs” — massive masses of congealed material that clog municipal sewer systems and cost millions in public infrastructure repair annually.

While the court record in this case focuses on individual consumer plumbing harm, the product class at issue — “flushable” wipes that are not actually flushable — has been identified by water utilities and environmental groups as a systemic infrastructure problem. When a corporation labels a product as safe for sewer systems and it is not, the cost is borne by consumers, by municipalities, and by the public utilities that maintain shared infrastructure that everyone depends on.

The Cost of a Settlement: Running the Numbers

What Now? Who to Watch and What to Demand

The Corporate Players

The defendant in this case is Kimberly-Clark Corporation, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, maker of Huggies, Kleenex, Scott, and Cottonelle brand products. The attorneys who negotiated the settlement on behalf of consumers were from Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP. The objector who forced this ruling, Theodore H. Frank, was represented by the Center for Class Action Fairness.

Regulatory Watchlist

• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Has jurisdiction over deceptive advertising and false labeling claims by consumer goods companies.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB): Monitors practices that cause consumers to pay inflated prices based on misleading product claims.
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): Tracks the downstream infrastructure impact of non-flushable products marketed as flushable.
• State Attorneys General: Can bring independent consumer protection suits outside the federal class action settlement structure.
• Second Circuit Court of Appeals: Issued this ruling and will review whether the remanded settlement analysis is properly conducted.

The Bigger Fight Doesn’t Happen in a Courtroom

Class action lawsuits are a tool, and like every tool, they can be turned against the people they are supposed to serve. The structure of this settlement — where a corporation keeps 95% of its promised payout and lawyers take three times what consumers receive — is a known, documented problem in consumer class actions. The appeals court ruling is a genuine win: it establishes that courts must scrutinize the lawyer-versus-consumer split in future settlements. But legal reform moves slowly. In the meantime, mutual aid networks, local consumer protection advocates, and community organizing around corporate accountability are the fastest way to build power that does not depend on a law firm filing on your behalf. Know your state’s consumer protection laws. Report deceptive labeling to your state AG. Demand that your local elected officials hold corporations accountable for product claims that damage household infrastructure.