When you sue a company for selling a defective product, the most powerful evidence you can put in front of a jury is the company's own words. With Roundup, we have those words — in writing, in email, in marked-up draft articles, and in strategy memos. They are called the Monsanto Papers.
What Are The Monsanto Papers?
"The Monsanto Papers" is the umbrella term for tens of thousands of pages of internal Monsanto documents released through court-ordered discovery in earlier rounds of Roundup product liability litigation. They include emails between Monsanto scientists and outside consultants, draft journal articles with Monsanto's edits visible, internal toxicology assessments, presentations to senior management, and communications with regulators. Many of them are now publicly available through litigation archives and have been reported on extensively in mainstream press.
What makes these documents valuable in court is not what Monsanto said publicly — the company has insisted for decades that Roundup is safe. The value is what its own people said internally when they thought no one outside the company would read it.
Ghost-Writing Scientific Articles
Among the most damaging revelations is a pattern of ghost-writing. The Monsanto Papers show internal exchanges in which Monsanto employees draft scientific articles defending glyphosate, then arrange for outside academics to put their names on those articles as if the academics had written them independently. Monsanto employees occasionally referred to this practice in plain English in their own emails — including one notorious 2015 message in which a senior Monsanto scientist wrote that the company could "ghost-write" a paper on epidemiology and IARC, with outside scientists "just edit & sign their names so to speak."
Why does this matter? Because for years Monsanto pointed to the published scientific literature as proof glyphosate was safe. If a meaningful share of that literature was authored, in whole or in substantial part, by Monsanto itself and merely signed by outside scientists, then the "independent science" defense collapses on its own foundation. Juries understand that. We make sure they see it.
Attacking The IARC Classification
In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) — the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization — classified glyphosate as a Group 2A carcinogen, meaning "probably carcinogenic to humans." The classification was based on a working group of 17 scientists from 11 countries who reviewed the available evidence on glyphosate's mechanism, animal studies, and human epidemiology.
The Monsanto Papers show that Monsanto saw the IARC classification coming weeks in advance and prepared a coordinated response. Internal communications detail plans to discredit the IARC working group, recruit allied scientists to publish counter-narratives, lobby regulators against accepting the classification, and pressure media outlets that covered the story unfavorably. The strategy was less about the science and more about reputation management.
Influencing The EPA's Review
The Monsanto Papers also reveal close, sustained, and at times improper coordination with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials reviewing glyphosate. Internal emails show Monsanto employees discussing how a particular EPA official could "kill" or delay a separate federal toxicology review of glyphosate — a review the company was actively trying to forestall. The same documents reflect Monsanto's longstanding effort to position the EPA's "not likely to be carcinogenic" conclusion as the definitive word on glyphosate, while simultaneously working to ensure that conclusion remained the EPA's position.
This matters in two ways. First, it complicates Monsanto's argument that "the EPA says it's safe, therefore it is safe" — if the EPA's conclusion was the product of a regulatory environment Monsanto helped shape, the conclusion is not as independent as Monsanto would like a jury to believe. Second, it puts Monsanto's behavior in the same family as the tobacco industry's decades-long effort to control the regulatory narrative around cigarettes.
The Tobacco Parallel — Why It Matters For Our Cases
Our firm has recovered over $100 million from cigarette manufacturers under a strict-product-liability framework. The reason that framework worked against tobacco was the existence of internal documents showing the industry knew about cancer risks for decades while telling the public the opposite. Those tobacco documents — the so-called "tobacco papers" released through state attorney general litigation in the 1990s — transformed how juries saw cigarette companies and changed product liability law in this country.
The Monsanto Papers occupy the same role in Roundup litigation. They convert what would otherwise be an abstract debate about epidemiology into a concrete story about what a corporation knew, what it said, and how those two things diverged. That story is what jurors return verdicts on.
How We Use The Monsanto Papers In Your Case
Every Roundup case we take on is built around three layers of evidence:
- The medical record. Herb Borroto, M.D., J.D., personally reads pathology, oncology charts, immunohistochemistry, and bone marrow biopsy reports to confirm the diagnosis fits a glyphosate-linked subtype.
- The exposure history. We document where, when, how often, and how intensely you used Roundup — on a farm, on a golf course, in a nursery, on a fence line, on a back yard.
- The Monsanto Papers. We anchor the case in the company's own words. The papers establish what Monsanto knew about the cancer signal, what it did to suppress that knowledge, and how its public reassurances about safety contradicted its private exchanges.
That three-layer structure is what carries a Roundup case from intake through trial. The science creates the link. The exposure connects you to the product. The Monsanto Papers establish the company's culpability. Together they give a jury everything it needs to return a verdict.
Bottom Line
The Monsanto Papers are not a theory or a press release. They are documents Monsanto wrote, sent, and stored — documents now part of the federal court record in the Roundup MDL. They show ghost-writing of "independent" science, coordinated attacks on the IARC classification, and influence over the EPA's review. They are the strongest piece of evidence available in any Roundup case, and we treat them that way.
If you or a family member used Roundup and were diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, B-cell Lymphoma, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, or Multiple Myeloma, we would like to talk. The free case review is exactly that: free. Herb Borroto reads the medical record himself. There is no obligation, and no fee unless we recover for you.