Photo Credit: Ben Crump/Instagram
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump just held a press confernce at the headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women in Washington for a new lawsuit filed against Johnson & Johnson for knowingly selling cancerous talcum powder hygeine products targeted at Black women. Multiple women from the council spoke about cancer diagnoses of theirs and some spoke about their continued usage since childhood due to marketing directed at their community.
Claims of studies showing cancer linkage going back to the ’60s appears in the lawsuit, studies that continued clear through the ’90s. He showed over a dozen case studies from a number of health organizations and science groups on the cancerous affects these products have caused. He showed how despite these studied widely available, J&J continued to sell Baby Powder and Shower to Shower powder products, both of which are talcum-rich.
The marketing towards Black women was important and crucial to J&J which as evidenced by the marketing presentations he brought forward showed the consumer-base as “highly important to business” and that they “need(ed) to maintain” their cash cow as it had become “difficult to efficiently retain core AA consumer.”
Aretha Frankling and Patti Labelle were even considered to be hired to help with marketing as representatives of the brand in the 2000s. Black radio stations were flooded with ads for the product along with other incredible lengths gone to push the products into their community. He is asking that the court system sanction J&J by forcing them to design a monitoring system to monitor who has been affected by their products within their targeted communities.
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