Another Monsanto Roundup Lawsuit

Twenty Years. One Diagnosis. A Company That Knew.

Mike Dennis is not a chemical worker. He is not a farm laborer standing in fields of spray. Dennis is a homeowner who did what millions of Americans do: he pulled out a bottle of Roundup and killed the weeds around his house. He did it every month, every year, from 2000 to 2020. That is 240 applications of a product its own manufacturer knew carried a cancer risk it refused to disclose.

In June 2020, Dennis was diagnosed with mycosis fungoides, a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The World Health Organization’s cancer research agency had already classified Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, as Group 2A: probably carcinogenic to humans, back in 2015. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is specifically among the cancers most associated with glyphosate exposure. Monsanto kept selling the product. Monsanto kept silent.

Roundup does not work through glyphosate alone. The product also contains additional ingredients engineered to increase absorption of glyphosate, pulling it deeper into plant tissue, and deeper into human skin. Every time Dennis mixed a batch and sprayed, the formula was designed to maximize penetration, including into his body.

What the Jury Formally Concluded

After hearing all the evidence, a California jury delivered a verdict that reads like an indictment. The jury found, point by point, that Roundup’s cancer risk was known or knowable based on accepted science at the time Monsanto manufactured and sold it. The jury found that ordinary customers, like Dennis, would have no way to recognize that danger on their own. The jury found that Monsanto knew or should reasonably have known users would not realize the risk.

The jury also found that Monsanto failed to adequately warn of the potential risks, failed to instruct on safe use, and that a reasonable manufacturer in the same position would have warned people. Most damningly, the jury found that Monsanto’s failure to warn was a substantial factor in causing Dennis’s mycosis fungoides. This is not a technicality. This is a jury of Dennis’s peers saying: Monsanto gave him cancer by staying quiet.

The jury awarded Dennis $2 million (enough to cover the average American’s healthcare costs for roughly 57 years) in past noneconomic losses, $5 million (roughly what a median-income worker earns in 125 years) in future noneconomic losses, and $325 million (more than most Americans will earn across 8,000 lifetimes of full-time work) in punitive damages. The trial court later reduced the punitive award to $21 million (still enough to cover four years of college tuition for approximately 560 students at the average U.S. public university). California’s Court of Appeal affirmed the full judgment on November 24, 2025.

The Money: What the Jury Awarded vs. What Monsanto Walked Away Paying

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Cannot Measure

Mike Dennis did not sign up for a clinical trial. He bought a product sold in hardware stores across America, followed the instructions on the bottle, and used it exactly as Monsanto intended millions of ordinary homeowners to use it. He sprayed Roundup around his home every month for two decades. Two decades of trusting a label that said nothing about cancer. Two decades of Monsanto collecting his money while concealing what it knew.

Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is not a diagnosis that arrives quietly. Mycosis fungoides, the specific form Dennis developed, is a cancer of the immune system, a slow and progressive destruction of the body from within. The jury awarded him $2 million (enough to fund roughly 57 years of average American healthcare costs) for past suffering alone, and $5 million (what a typical American worker earns across 125 years of full-time employment) for what his future holds. These numbers represent the human arithmetic of betrayal: pain measured in dollars because the law has no other language for it.

The trial court’s findings expose something even more corrosive than the product itself. The court found that Monsanto engaged in active efforts to limit research and shape scientific discourse around Roundup’s cancer risk. This means the people who should have been warning Dennis were instead funding campaigns to make sure no warning ever reached him. Every weed he killed in his yard was a transaction that lined Monsanto’s pockets while the company worked behind the scenes to keep him in the dark. That is a specific, documented form of corporate contempt for human life.

The jury’s malice finding is the legal system’s closest equivalent to calling Monsanto’s behavior evil. Under California law, malice includes “despicable conduct carried on with a willful and conscious disregard of the rights or safety of others.” The jury found that this conduct was carried out by Monsanto’s own officers, directors, and managing agents, not rogue employees, not bad contractors. The people at the top made the decision, repeatedly, year after year, to protect Roundup’s market position rather than the bodies of the people using it. Dennis’s diagnosis is the direct result of those decisions.

Dennis is one person. One name in a courtroom. But Roundup has been sold to homeowners, farmers, groundskeepers, and landscapers across this country for decades. The court record shows that prior punitive damage awards already exist for Monsanto’s conduct with this exact product. Monsanto has been here before. Multiple juries, in multiple cases, have looked at the evidence and reached the same conclusion. The company paid fines, appealed reductions, and kept selling. Monsanto has not, at the time of this ruling, committed to placing a cancer warning on any glyphosate-based product it continues to sell. The ledger of human cost continues to grow.

There is a specific, quiet horror in the phrase “monthly for approximately 20 years.” It describes a ritual. A person tending their home, season after season, performing what feels like responsible property maintenance. Roundup’s marketing made this feel normal. Safe. Even virtuous. The company turned the act of following directions into a decades-long exposure event, and then spent its legal resources arguing it bore no responsibility for the outcome. The trial court called that what it is: a reckless disregard for the health and safety of the public, executed using vast corporate resources, over several decades, to protect profits.

Legal Receipts: What the Record Actually Says

These are direct findings and quotations from the court record. No paraphrase. No spin. This is what courts and juries formally concluded about Monsanto’s conduct.

“Monsanto knew or should reasonably have known that Roundup can cause or was likely to cause NHL when used in accordance with widespread and commonly recognized practice… Monsanto knew or should reasonably have known that users would not realize that danger.” — Jury Verdict Form Findings, Dennis v. Monsanto (2025), as cited in the Court of Appeal Opinion

“Monsanto engage[d] in conduct with malice, oppression or fraud committed by one or more officers, directors or managing agents of Monsanto acting on behalf of Monsanto.” — Jury Finding, Dennis v. Monsanto (2025), as cited in the Court of Appeal Opinion

“The EPA has never said Monsanto could not put a cancer warning on the Roundup label; and, indeed, Monsanto has never asked the EPA to permit such a label. Instead, Monsanto has consistently presented evidence to the EPA disputing the connection between Roundup and NHL and, thus, the EPA has not required the warning.” — California Court of Appeal, Dennis v. Monsanto, November 24, 2025

“Dennis presented evidence that Monsanto acted maliciously in misrepresenting the science to the EPA, and it appears the jury and the trial court agreed. Thus, the mere fact that the EPA approved a label for Roundup that does not contain a cancer warning does not establish that Roundup was not misbranded because it did not include a warning necessary to protect health.” — California Court of Appeal, Dennis v. Monsanto, November 24, 2025

“The evidence demonstrated not only the failure of Monsanto to adequately investigate the risk, but active efforts to limit research and shape scientific discourse regarding the risk.” — Trial Court Finding, as quoted in the Court of Appeal Opinion, Dennis v. Monsanto, 2025

“Monsanto was ‘a multibillion-dollar company which intentionally used its vast resources over several decades to protect its profits over the safety of ordinary consumers [like Dennis], showing a reckless disregard for the health and safety of the public.’ ” — Trial Court Finding, as quoted in the Court of Appeal Opinion, Dennis v. Monsanto, 2025

The Timeline: Decades of Silence

Societal Impact: The Blast Radius of Monsanto’s Choices

The Cost of a Life: Monsanto’s Arithmetic

They Did Not Just Hide the Risk. They Attacked the Science.

The most chilling detail in this entire court record is not a dollar figure. It is a finding about what Monsanto did to the scientific process itself. The trial court found that the evidence demonstrated “not only the failure of Monsanto to adequately investigate the risk, but active efforts to limit research and shape scientific discourse regarding the risk.” This means Monsanto did not simply look the other way. It intervened in the production of knowledge.

The court further found that “any limitation in the available knowledge of the risk was the result of Monsanto’s efforts to suppress it, or at minimum to limit discourse and further investigation.” Read that again. The reason there was less certainty in the public record about Roundup’s cancer risk is partly because Monsanto worked to make it that way. The company used its resources to constrain the very science that should have protected consumers like Dennis.

The court also found that Dennis presented evidence of Monsanto’s “responses to scientific studies and potential reclassification by regulatory agencies.” The EPA’s decision not to require a cancer label on Roundup came, at least in part, from evidence and arguments Monsanto submitted. The court of appeal noted that Monsanto “has thus far convinced the EPA (perhaps using nonobjective data) to maintain a different conclusion.” That parenthetical, “perhaps using nonobjective data,” is a California appellate court suggesting Monsanto may have manipulated the federal regulatory process.

Monsanto is now owned by Bayer, which is in my opinion the single most evil corporation in the world.

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