A Chicago federal judge won't allow hair care and cosmetic product maker Revlon to use bankruptcy proceedings - yet - to wash away class actions and many other of the thousands of lawsuits it faces over claims its hair straightening products allegedly caused cancer.
On Sept. 27, U.S. District Judge Mary Rowland said she could not yet strike down an untold, but potentially significant number of legal claims against Revlon. In her ruling, Rowland said such an order at this point would cause her to come into conflict with a New York federal bankruptcy court, which has yet to determine which claims against Revlon are viable amid the company's bankruptcy proceedings.
"The Court agrees that only class members with viable claims against Revlon as governed by the bankruptcy court’s orders and Plan may assert class claims against Revlon," Rowland wrote. "While the parties continue to litigate whose claims are viable before the bankruptcy court, the Court will not determine the scope of who has a viable claim against Revlon as doing so would be to effectively rule on the same issue before another court."
The ruling came as part of a flurry of decisions released on Sept. 27, generally refusing to grant several motions from Revlon to dismiss, or at least significantly pare down the sprawling legal claims against the company.
In those rulings, the judge also refused Revlon's attempt to dump out a class action lawsuit from plaintiffs who can't prove they were ever actually harmed by Revlon's products. In that class action, plaintiffs claimed the threat of potentially contracting cancer or other illnesses from being exposed to the company's hair relaxer products should force Revlon to pay them, because Revlon allegedly should have known their products were allegedly dangerous, but did not properly warn them before they purchased and used the products.
Lawsuits against Revlon and other makers of so-called hair relaxer products, primarily used by black women, have piled into courts across the country since 2021. According to some estimates, as many as 8,500 individual and class action lawsuits have been filed against companies including Revlon, L'Oreal and others.
At least hundreds of the claims have been brought in Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago, alone, in that time.
The lawsuits have been fueled by reports from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Minority Health Sciences, asserting women who used hair relaxer products were at a significantly higher risk of contracting uterine and ovarian cancer.
The lawsuits have been brought primarily on behalf of thousands of black women who claim they contracted such cancers from their use of the hair relaxer products, allegedly driven by the American health and beauty industry and the greater white-majority society, in general, which allegedly encouraged black women to straighten naturally curly hair to "conform to Eurocentric beauty standards."
A federal judicial panel consolidated many of the cases filed from 2021-2023 into a single action, known as multi-district litigation (MDL), before Judge Rowland in the Northern District of Illinois.
The lawsuits all carry the same essential claims against the hair product makers, accusing them of misleading consumers about the safety of their products; failing to warn consumers of the health risks allegedly associated with using the products; breach of warranty, under both state and federal laws; and fraud, as well as personal injury and wrongful death claims.
They are seeking a potentially massive payout, including punitive damages, which are damages awarded entirely to punish defendants, and are ordered on top of actual financial losses or to cover actual medical bills.
To date, the actual financial award sought by the plaintiffs has not been made public.
No case from the sprawling litigation has yet gone to trial. According to a post published on a blog concerning the hair relaxer litigation maintained by the plaintiffs' law firm of Miller & Zois, of Baltimore, the first of several proposed so-called "bellwether trials" could proceed in the fall of 2025, with others potentially following in early 2026.
Bellwether trials are typically held in such consolidated litigation to allow judges and juries to select a few representative cases and evaluate the claims and evidence common to most of the remaining cases. Verdicts one way or another could then influence an ultimate settlement or lead to further trials.
To this point, Revlon and others have failed to significantly diminish or toss the legal claims against them.
Amid the legal proceedings, Revlon sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, to allow the company to restructure $2.7 billion of its debt and address "enterprise-threatening risks" to the company. As part of those proceedings, the company secured an order from a bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of New York that appeared to limit the potential damage the company could face as it attempts to resolve the hair relaxer lawsuits.
Under that 2023 order, the bankruptcy court said people with claims against Revlon must file a proof of claim by April 2023, or potentially not have any claim to "distribution" from Revlon "on account of a Hair Straightening Claim."
Citing that decision, Revlon asked Judge Rowland to strike class actions filed against the company that Revlon asserted would improperly include an untold number of plaintiffs whose claims against Revlon don't comply with the bankruptcy court's instructions.
The company said the class actions amount to an "end-run around the bankruptcy court's orders and Plan."
In response, plaintiffs asserted Revlon sought an overly simplistic application of the bankruptcy court's orders to the litigation. They asserted pulling the plug on the class actions would wrongly block out people with claims that could somehow still be viable, even under the bankruptcy court's order, based on the unique circumstances and facts behind their claims.
While agreeing that the bankruptcy court's order could limit the number of claims faced by Revlon, Judge Rowland said she also agreed with plaintiffs' assertions that courts and the parties must yet detangle the knot of litigation and competing claims to determine which fall under the bankruptcy court's order and which do not.
And she said that work should be completed first in the bankruptcy court in New York.
At the same time in other orders, Judge Rowland rejected other attempts by Revlon to end the class action litigation. These included a rejection of Revlon's attempt to end class claims asserting plaintiffs who can't demonstrate they were actually harmed by the products.
Revlon argued plaintiffs shouldn't be allowed to advance class action claims over merely "economic damages."
Plaintiffs are represented in the MDL by lead co-counsel including attorneys Dianda "Fu" Debrosse, of Dicello Levitt LLP, of Birmingham, Alabama; Fidelma L. Fitzpatrick, of Motley Rice LLC, of Providence, Rhode Island; Michael A. London, of Douglas & London P.C., of New York; Benjamin L. Crump, of Ben Crump Law Firm, of Tallahassee, Florida; and Edward A. Wallace, of Wallace Miller, of Chicago.
Revlon is represented by attorneys Randall S. Luskey, Robert A. Atkins, Daniel H. Levi and David E. Cole, of the firm of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP, of San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C.; and Edward P. Abbot, Erich J. Gleber and Melissa He, of Hawkins Parnell & Young LLP, of New York.