The Legal Defense That Blames Asbestos Victims for Their Own Cancer.

Kirt Bjoin spent his youth under the Southern California sun, learning his father’s trade. Starting as a teenager in the late 1970s, he laid sewer, water, and drain pipes. He worked with his hands, cutting lengths of asbestos cement (AC) pipe with a power saw, a cloud of dust billowing around him. It was hard, dirty work, the kind of work that builds a country’s infrastructure.

Decades later, in 2021, that cloud of dust came back to haunt him. Kirt Bjoin was diagnosed with lung cancer.

He and his wife, Allison, were sure they knew the cause. It was the dust from all those years ago, from the AC pipe made and sold by J-M Manufacturing Company, Inc. (JMM). They believed the company, a direct successor to the infamous asbestos giant Johns-Manville, had a duty to warn him about the lethal danger hidden in their product. So they sued, seeking justice for a life irrevocably altered.

But JMM had a different story to tell. Theirs wasn’t a story of corporate responsibility… because why would they paint themselves as the villains lmao theirs was a story designed to blame Kirt Bjoin himself. And in a ghastly demonstration of how our legal system often fails victims, the courts agreed.

How to Blame a Worker for Your Dangerous Product

JMM didn’t win by arguing its product was safe. How could it? The dangers of asbestos are settled science. Instead, they attacked the worker.

Their defense rested on two brutal, blame-shifting legal arguments.

First, they used the “sophisticated user” defense. This is a legal doctrine that says a manufacturer doesn’t have to warn someone about a product’s dangers if that person, because of their job, experience, or training, knew or should have known about the risks. JMM’s argument was essentially this: “Kirt Bjoin wasn’t just some clueless guy in a ditch.

He was a professional, a supervisor, even a business owner. He was smart enough and experienced enough that he should have figured out the danger on his own. We didn’t need to tell him.”

I mean, that obviously ignores the fact that people need to work a job in order to not die in our modern day society….

Second, they claimed product misuse. JMM argued that cutting their AC pipe with a power saw—the very thing Bjoin and his coworkers did for years—was a “so highly extraordinary” misuse of the product that they couldn’t possibly have foreseen it. They argued this “misuse” was the sole cause of Bjoin’s cancer.

Think about that. An evil corporation which sold a product used for construction argued it was unforeseeable that construction workers would use a common construction tool to cut it.

The ripple effect for Kirt Bjoin was devastating. His own life story- the grit he showed when his father disappeared and he and a partner took over the business, his rise from laborer to foreman to co-owner of his own company- was twisted into a weapon against him.

The very experience and responsibility that defined his career were used to label him “sophisticated,” a man who no longer deserved a warning. Peak victim blaming.

From Worksites to Courtrooms: A Timeline of a Tragedy

The Systemic Problem: When Experience Becomes a Liability

This case is a terrifying window into a legal system that is often tilted in favor of corporations. The “sophisticated user” doctrine has become a go-to defense for companies that produce hazardous materials for industrial use. It effectively creates a catch-22 for skilled workers: the more experienced you are, the less legal protection you have.

The law presumes that with experience comes knowledge of all potential dangers, even dangers that companies spent decades concealing.

The “so what” is that this shifts the fundamental burden of safety. It tells manufacturers, “You don’t have to put a clear warning on your deadly product if the person using it is a professional.” It absolves the creator of the danger and places the onus entirely on the person exposed to it. It’s a legal framework that punishes competence and rewards corporate silence.

Making matters worse was the court’s decision on Bjoin’s “fraudulent concealment” claim. The court threw it out because Bjoin didn’t have a “direct relationship” with JMM; he bought their pipe from a supply house, not from the factory door. This creates an absurd shield. A manufacturer can hide a product’s dangers, sell it through distributors, and then claim they had no duty to be honest with the end-user who ultimately gets sick.

The Aftermath: No Accountability, No Justice

The jury found for JMM on all counts. The appeals court affirmed the judgment. For Kirt Bjoin and his family, the legal battle is over, and they lost. The system validated the company’s narrative: that a man who spent his life working with a product should have known it would one day give him cancer, and that using a power tool to do his job was his own “extraordinary” fault.

No one was held accountable.

A company that inherited the toxic legacy of Johns-Manville successfully argued that it was the worker, not the asbestos pipe, that was the problem. The verdict sends a chilling message to every skilled laborer in America: your expertise can be used against you, and the companies that make the dangerous materials you work with may owe you nothing, not even a warning.

Real Solutions for a Rigged Game

This outcome is a feature of a legal system that needs reform. The “sophisticated user” doctrine, at least as it applies to asbestos, should be reexamined. Given the long and sordid history of corporate concealment surrounding asbestos, should any user be deemed “sophisticated” enough to not deserve a clear and direct warning?

Furthermore, the duty to disclose dangers shouldn’t stop at the distributor’s loading dock. Manufacturers who put toxic products into the stream of commerce should have a non-delegable duty to warn the people at the end of the line—the workers whose health is on the line.

Kirt Bjoin’s story is a tragedy. But it’s also a warning. The literal and figurative dust from the past hasn’t settled. It has worked its way into the logic of our courtrooms, where the battle for corporate accountability is still being fought, and too often, lost.

Bro’s reward for a lifetime of exploitative hard work was literally cancer and being told that he was to blame for it.

All factual claims in this article are sourced from the Court of Appeal of the State of California, Second Appellate District, Division Eight, opinion in Bjoin v. J-M Manufacturing Company, Inc., filed July 25, 2025.