Roundup weed killing products are offered for sale at a home improvement store on May 14, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois (Scott Olson/Getty Images).
German chemical giant Bayer is improperly using a court order to hide details of a propaganda campaign targeting Missouri lawmakers and potential jurors, an emergency motion to lift the confidentiality cloak claims.
At a hearing on Thursday in Cole County Circuit Court, attorney Matt Clement will argue that 46 “public relations” documents designated as confidential by Bayer’s attorneys contain no proprietary information.
Instead, Clement wrote in the motion filed last week, the records — included among 20,000 delivered under discovery — detail the methods Bayer has used to influence opinion, including radio, television and print ads.
Bayer acquired Roundup — and the liability that may accrue in lawsuits over its health effects — when it took over St. Louis-based Monsanto in 2018. There are approximately 25,000 lawsuits pending in Cole County alleging that Roundup causes cancer and the label failed to warn consumers of the risk.
“Cole County has been especially inundated with Monsanto’s propaganda,” Clement wrote in the motion seeking to unseal the records. “Legion are its billboards, radio and television ads, social media pop ups and other communications seeking to convince both the jury pool and the legislature that the lawsuits involving Roundup are somehow illegitimate and that Bayer/Monsanto needs legislative protection.”
Clement represents Ronald Jackelen of Somerset, Wisconsin, in a case filed in Cole County in 2022. Jackelen has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma he blames on Roundup and its main ingredient, glyphosate.
Clement declined to comment on the filing.
Legislation that passed the Missouri House last month to protect Bayer would make the label mandated by the EPA for all chemicals classified as pesticides — weed killers, bug killers and fertilizers — “sufficient to satisfy any requirement for a warning label regarding cancer.”
The bill is awaiting assignment to a state Senate committee.
Several lawsuits are scheduled for trial this year. Bayer has already been through a 2023 trial where a Cole County jury awarded three plaintiffs $1.56 billion, including $1.5 billion in punitive damages. The verdict was reduced to $622 million and is under appeal, with arguments scheduled for April 10 in Kirksville.
Two organizations are making direct public appeals seeking support for legislation protecting glyphosate.
One set of messages, running on Jefferson City-area radio stations, is from an organization called the Modern Ag Alliance. The ads present glyphosate as a benign, beneficial chemical essential to modern agriculture.
The other, from the Protect America Initiative, includes television ads in central Missouri and a direct mail campaign accusing nine Republican state senators of betraying President Donald Trump’s agenda by allowing “Chinese Communist Party chemicals” to take over the market.
The Modern Ag Alliance has spent almost $100,000 on its ad campaign since mid-November, Federal Communications Commission records show. The ads are designed to educate the public, not influence potential jurors, said Jess Christiansen, spokeswoman for Bayer Crop Science at its U.S. headquarters in St. Louis County.
“That’s not the business we’re in,” Christiansen said. “Those campaigns are nothing more than that, just to educate and inform.”
Bayer doesn’t hide that it is part of the Modern Ag Alliance, which Christiansen said has about 90 other partners.
The Protect America Initiative has spent almost $175,000 since late January — including a $75,000 ad during the Super Bowl — in addition to the direct mail effort.
If they were intended to boost support for the legislation, the ads and mailers have backfired, with the nine senators holding a joint news conference last week denouncing the attacks. They said they were convinced Bayer was responsible and would ask the Missouri Ethics Commission to investigate.
“It’s dark money, through and through,” said state Sen. Nick Schroer, a Republican from Defiance.
Bayer has no connection with the politically charged ads, Christiansen said.
“There’s lots of misinformation swirling around,” she said. “We are willing to sit with whomever it is. I don’t care if it’s a Republican, a Democrat, a libertarian, a Freedom Caucus member. We need to work together.”
In the motion to be argued Thursday, Clement wrote that the documents that should be unsealed detail how Bayer crafted its messaging, who it has enlisted to deliver it from a seemingly neutral position and how much it has paid for advertising and lobbying.
“Monsanto’s motivation for its abuse of the protective order to blanket-designate these documents as ‘confidential’ is clear — to hide Monsanto’s ongoing attempts to improperly influence the public, as well as its legislative efforts concerning the safety of glyphosate, such that it can continue to sell and profit from the product without a warning,” Clement wrote.
Bayer is the only U.S. manufacturer of glyphosate, with a production facility in Luling, Louisiana, that is the world’s largest single producer. Other production facilities are in Idaho and Iowa. China is the world’s other main supplier of glyphosate. China and India are major world suppliers of a variety of farm chemicals.
Along with the U.S. corporate headquarters, Bayer has its research and development facilities in St. Louis County. Its total Missouri employment is about 5,000, Christiansen said.
Along with Missouri, legislation to designate the EPA label as the only label needed on Roundup and other regulated farm chemicals is being pushed in Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa,
Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming, Christiansen said.
“The purpose of the legislation is to really protect access to critical crop protection tools that farmers need to safely, effectively and affordably produce the food we all need,” Christiansen said.
Winning passage of the legislation in Missouri is especially important because most state-level cases are filed here because it is the national home of Bayer. When a Missouri-based corporation is sued by someone for injuries that occurred outside the state, the case must be filed in the court covering the location of the company’s registered agent.
Bayer’s registered agent was in St. Louis County, and thousands of cases were filed there before the company shifted its agent to Jefferson City in October 2021. Last year, following the massive jury award in Cole County, the registered agent was moved again, back to St. Louis County.
Thousands of new cases have been filed in St. Louis County since the shift. There are also a multitude of federal lawsuits pending in the U.S. District Court for Northern California.
Bayer has set aside about $16 billion to deal with Roundup lawsuits, including more than $10 billion it has already paid out in settlements, Christiansen said.
“This failure to warn claim just is not valid, because, No. 1, glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer,” Christiansen said. “And No. 2, we’re labeling according to how we’re legally required to label.”
Glyphosate is listed as a probable cause of cancer by the International Agency on Research of Cancer, a part of the World Health Organization.
“There is limited evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of glyphosate,” stated a 2016 report evaluating research worldwide. “A positive association has been observed for non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”
There are four categories of public relations documents Clement is asking Circuit Judge Daniel Green to unseal. They are records showing correspondence with journalists or third parties, with talking points for use in public interviews; plans for advertising and media buys; lobbying strategies; and how it enlists third parties to deliver messages the public would mistrust if it came from Bayer.
“These documents are important to this litigation because they demonstrate Monsanto’s efforts to manipulate and mislead the public,” Clement wrote.
In the filing, Clement noted that in a pretrial order for a California case, denying Monsanto’s motion for summary judgment, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria focused on the company’s efforts to sway the public as it contested the allegations that Roundup causes cancer.
“Although the evidence that Roundup causes cancer is quite equivocal,” Chhabria wrote, “there is strong evidence from which a jury could conclude that Monsanto does not particularly care whether its product is in fact giving people cancer, focusing instead on manipulating public opinion and undermining anyone who raises genuine and legitimate concerns about the issue.”
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