A man sprayed Monsanto’s weedkiller on his property for 25 consecutive years, developed blood cancer, presented a board-certified oncologist in federal court, and still lost, because Monsanto’s lawyers forced that doctor to admit on the stand that he could not say whether his own patient was overweight.

A Quarter Century of Roundup, Then a Blood Cancer Diagnosis

From 1990 to 2015, Peter Engilis, Jr. hand-sprayed Roundup, Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide, several times per month across all three of his homes in Florida. That is not a one-time exposure or an occupational hazard absorbed at a job site. That is 25 years of a man choosing a product sold to him by a corporation that told him it was safe, spraying it repeatedly, breathing it, absorbing it through his skin, trusting it.

In 2014, Engilis received a diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), a type of blood cancer classified as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL). He was not alone. Thousands of cancer patients across the country had already filed similar lawsuits alleging Roundup caused their NHL. These cases were consolidated into a massive federal multidistrict litigation in the Northern District of California. Engilis filed his lawsuit in November 2019.

To connect his cancer to Roundup, Engilis relied on the expert opinion of Dr. Andrew Schneider, a board-certified oncologist. Dr. Schneider conducted what is called a “differential etiology,” a scientific technique where a doctor first lists every possible cause of a disease and then systematically eliminates them, one by one, until the most likely cause remains. Dr. Schneider ruled in Roundup as a possible cause and ruled out dozens of other factors, including obesity. His conclusion: Roundup caused or substantially contributed to Engilis’s cancer.

The Multidistrict Machine: Engilis vs. a Corporate Legal Army

Monsanto did not show up to defend itself with one lawyer. The appellee’s counsel list in this case runs to six separate law firms and at least seven named attorneys, including partners from Covington & Burling, Wilkinson Stekloff, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, and Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer. These are some of the most powerful corporate defense firms in the United States. Engilis’s team, by contrast, was a three-firm coalition of Florida personal injury attorneys.

The resource disparity in Roundup litigation is not incidental. It is structural. Monsanto, now owned by Bayer AG, has faced litigation on a scale that would bankrupt most companies. It has survived because it can outlast, outspend, and out-lawyer the individuals it has harmed. The Engilis case illustrates that strategy in miniature: find the weakness in the plaintiff’s expert, hammer it until it cracks, and walk away clean.

What the Courts Won’t Put a Price On

A Man Reduced to a Data Point He Couldn’t Even Verify

Peter Engilis trusted the product. That is the foundation of the whole story, and the courts never had to grapple with it because the case never reached a jury. For 25 years, across three separate homes, he picked up the Roundup bottle, attached it to his hose, and treated it like any other household tool. He had no reason to believe otherwise. Monsanto manufactured that trust deliberately, through advertising, lobbying, and the active suppression of inconvenient science. When Engilis got sick, Monsanto’s response was to hire seven attorneys to ensure he died without compensation.

At the Daubert hearing, the moment that ended Engilis’s case was not a scientific breakthrough. It was a procedural trap. Monsanto’s lawyers confronted Dr. Schneider with medical records showing that Engilis had a BMI of 32.9 in December 2000 and a BMI of 33 in November 2014, the same year he was diagnosed with cancer. Dr. Schneider had written in his report that Engilis was “negative” for obesity, citing a document called a “Plaintiff Fact Sheet,” whose origin the court noted was unclear. The doctor had never examined Engilis. He had never seen a photograph of him. He had never spoken to him. He had built a causation opinion on a form he could not verify, about a body he had never evaluated.

When pressed, Dr. Schneider stated: “I certainly can’t say whether [Engilis is] obese or not.” That sentence ended the case. Everything Engilis had endured, the 25 years of chemical exposure, the blood cancer diagnosis, the years of litigation, the transfer across federal districts, came down to one moment where his own expert admitted he had guessed. The court ruled Dr. Schneider’s testimony inadmissible. With no expert, Engilis had no evidence of specific causation. With no causation, he had no case. Summary judgment went to Monsanto.

Cathy Engilis: The Plaintiff the Opinion Doesn’t Name

The court opinion lists two plaintiffs: Peter Engilis, Jr. and Cathy Engilis. The opinion immediately notes that “for present purposes, we need refer only to Peter Engilis.” Cathy Engilis, who is almost certainly Peter’s wife or a close family member, is named, acknowledged, and then set aside in a single sentence. The source material does not elaborate on her claims or her experience, and this publication will not speculate. What can be said is this: she was a plaintiff. She had standing to sue. She was harmed enough to join the case. And then the legal machinery of this case rendered her invisible in the same document that dismissed her husband’s claim.

The System Didn’t Fail Peter Engilis. It Worked Exactly as Designed.

It is worth sitting with what the federal rules of evidence actually required here. The court did not rule that Roundup is safe. It did not rule that Roundup did not cause Engilis’s cancer. It ruled that Engilis’s lawyer failed to prepare his expert witness well enough. The evidentiary standard at issue, Federal Rule of Evidence 702, is a procedural gatekeeping mechanism designed to keep junk science out of courtrooms. It is a legitimate rule with legitimate purposes. But when that rule is applied with the full institutional weight of six corporate law firms pressing every procedural advantage, it becomes a weapon that ordinary people and even competent doctors cannot reliably defend against. Dr. Schneider had 34 years of clinical oncology experience. He still lost to a procedural technicality about a form he cited without verifying.

The night before the Daubert hearing, Dr. Schneider searched Google and found an article he claimed showed that only 3 of 40 studies examining obesity and NHL showed a positive association. That article, if properly cited and analyzed in his expert report from the beginning, might have strengthened his case considerably. Instead, it was an afterthought, a last-minute scramble. The court correctly noted that evidence introduced at a hearing that was never disclosed in the expert’s written report cannot form the basis of that expert’s admissible opinion. The rules do not permit that. But the human meaning of that moment is something else entirely: a 34-year oncology veteran searching Google the night before a hearing to save a cancer patient’s case against one of the most powerful agricultural corporations on earth. That is what the resource imbalance between Monsanto and Peter Engilis actually looks like.

They Said It Out Loud. In Court. Under Oath.

“Dr. Schneider conceded that he ‘certainly can’t say whether [Engilis is] obese or not.'” U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit — Engilis v. Monsanto Company (2025)

“Dr. Schneider did not examine Engilis and could not say whether Engilis was obese or not… he had not ever spoken to Engilis or seen a photo of him.” U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit — Engilis v. Monsanto Company (2025)

“Dr. Schneider also referred to an article he found on Google the night before the Daubert hearing, which purportedly showed that, of forty studies that examined the relationship between obesity and NHL, only three showed a positive association.” U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit — Engilis v. Monsanto Company (2025)

“The provenance of this fact sheet, including the identity of the person who prepared it, is not clear from the record.” U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit — Engilis v. Monsanto Company (2025), footnote 4

“Aside from the reference to Engilis’s fact sheet, Dr. Schneider’s expert report provides no support for his conclusion that Engilis was not obese. The expert report does not cite any of Engilis’s medical records to support the conclusion that he was not obese. It does not reference Engilis’s weight, BMI, or body shape. And it does not cite or rely on any testimony from Engilis.” U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit — Engilis v. Monsanto Company (2025)

“Without articulating a reasoned basis for his opinion, Dr. Schneider failed to establish that his testimony was ‘based on sufficient facts or data.'” U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit — Engilis v. Monsanto Company (2025), citing Fed. R. Evid. 702(b)

This Case Is Bigger Than One Man’s Cancer

Public Health: Thousands of Cancer Patients, One Broken Template

The Engilis case does not exist in isolation. It is one case inside a federal multidistrict litigation that contains thousands of cancer victims who all allege Roundup caused their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The court opinion itself references a prior bellwether trial, Hardeman v. Monsanto Co., in which the Ninth Circuit affirmed a judgment in the plaintiff’s favor. That case succeeded. Engilis’s case failed. The difference between winning and losing in Roundup litigation is not primarily about the science of whether glyphosate causes cancer. It is about whether a plaintiff’s legal team can build an airtight expert witness report that survives corporate cross-examination. The people who can afford meticulous preparation sometimes win. The people who cannot, lose.

The public health stakes embedded in this litigation are enormous. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is not a rare or obscure disease. It is one of the more common blood cancers in the United States. Roundup is, by any measure, one of the most widely used herbicides in American history. Residential users like Engilis, who sprayed it on their lawns and gardens for decades, represent a massive population of potentially exposed individuals who had no occupational safety training, no protective equipment requirements, and no regulatory agency telling them to be careful. The scientific debate about glyphosate’s carcinogenicity is ongoing and contested. But the Engilis opinion makes no ruling on that debate. It simply rules that this particular plaintiff could not meet a procedural threshold. That means thousands of others are watching the same threshold determine their fate.

The case also reinforces a structural public health problem: the burden of proving causation in toxic tort cases falls entirely on the patient. A person gets sick, suspects a corporate product caused it, and must then fund and produce expert scientific testimony sufficient to survive a Daubert hearing against a corporation with virtually unlimited legal resources. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015. That classification sits in the scientific record. But under U.S. civil litigation rules, a cancer patient still has to prove, through a specific expert’s methodology, that the herbicide caused their specific cancer in their specific body. The gap between “probably causes cancer” and “we can prove it caused your cancer” is where corporations like Monsanto live and thrive.

Economic Inequality: The Price of Losing Is a Disease You Can’t Afford

Peter Engilis received no compensation from this lawsuit. The costs of CLL, a blood cancer, are severe and ongoing. Treatment can involve chemotherapy, immunotherapy, targeted drug therapies, and long-term monitoring, all of which carry costs that can run into tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars over a patient’s lifetime. The source material does not state Engilis’s financial situation or his medical bills, and this publication will not speculate on specific figures not in the record. What the record does establish is that he spent years in federal litigation, transferred across court districts, engaged multiple law firms, and ultimately received zero dollars from the company whose product he used for a quarter century before developing cancer.

Meanwhile, Monsanto’s defense was funded by some of the most expensive corporate law firms in America. Covington & Burling, one of the firms listed as Monsanto’s counsel, regularly bills at rates exceeding $1,000 per hour for senior partners. The litigation asymmetry in this case is not a bug in the system. It is the system. Corporations facing mass tort litigation have every financial incentive to invest heavily in legal defense because each successful dismissal removes one plaintiff from the liability pool and sends a signal to thousands of others still waiting for their day in court. When Monsanto wins a case on a procedural ground like expert witness exclusion, it does not just defeat one cancer patient. It refines its strategy for defeating the next thousand.

The economic inequality dimension here also operates at the community level. Residential Roundup users like Engilis are predominantly middle-class homeowners and small-scale gardeners, people who bought the product at hardware stores and big box retailers, who received no occupational health training, and who had no mechanism for collective bargaining over their exposure. Agricultural workers who used Roundup professionally at least theoretically had access to OSHA protections and employer liability frameworks, however inadequate those may be in practice. Homeowners using the product on their own land had nothing but the corporation’s word that it was safe. That word was worth exactly what Peter Engilis got in court: nothing.

What Winning Looks Like When You’re the Corporation

You Are Not Powerless. Here’s What to Do With This Information.

The Regulatory Bodies That Should Be Watching

• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): The EPA’s 2020 interim decision found that glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” That assessment is directly contested by the WHO’s IARC classification. Demand the EPA re-open its glyphosate review with full public comment and independent scientific panels free from industry funding.
• Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC): Consumer-grade Roundup sold at hardware and garden stores reaches ordinary homeowners with no occupational safety requirements. Push for mandatory warning labels reflecting the contested carcinogenicity status of glyphosate.
• Department of Justice (DOJ): The Roundup multidistrict litigation involves thousands of cancer patients. The DOJ’s Civil Division has authority to investigate whether Monsanto engaged in fraudulent suppression of health risk evidence, a documented allegation in related litigation that produced internal Monsanto documents during discovery.
• Federal Judicial Center: The expert witness standards in Federal Rule of Evidence 702 create a gatekeeping system that systematically advantages well-funded corporate defendants. Advocate for reforms to the Daubert framework that account for the resource disparity between individual plaintiffs and corporate defendants in mass tort litigation.
• State Attorneys General: Several states have consumer protection statutes that may apply to Monsanto’s marketing of Roundup as safe for residential use. Contact your state AG’s office and demand an investigation into Roundup’s consumer-facing safety claims.

The Roundup Watchlist: Cases Still Active

The Engilis case is one decision. The multidistrict litigation, In re Roundup Products Liability Litigation, contains thousands of additional cases still working through the federal system. Bayer AG, which acquired Monsanto in 2018 for approximately $63 billion ($63 billion, more than the entire GDP of many small nations and enough to pay the annual rent of over 1.6 million American families), has attempted multiple global settlements of Roundup litigation. None of those settlements have fully resolved all pending claims. Every one of those plaintiffs is a person like Peter Engilis.

What You Can Do Right Now

If you or someone you know has used Roundup regularly and developed NHL or CLL: Contact a toxic tort attorney and document your exposure history immediately. Do not wait. Statute of limitations rules vary by state and can cut off your right to sue. The outcome in Engilis was not about whether Roundup causes cancer. It was about expert witness preparation. A different attorney, with better resources and a more rigorous expert process, might produce a different result.

At the community level: Support organizations working on pesticide regulation reform, including the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) and the Center for Food Safety. These groups track glyphosate policy at the federal and state level and provide public comment infrastructure. Join local mutual aid networks focused on environmental health, particularly in agricultural or suburban communities with high Roundup use. Collective pressure on regulatory agencies and legislators moves faster than individual litigation. Monsanto wins in court one case at a time. Organized communities win in Congress and at the EPA all at once.