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“Philip Morris' victimhood dates back to 1999, when an Oregon jury hit the company with a $79 million punitive damages award in a lawsuit Williams filed after her husband Jesse died. She had argued that Philip Morris had deceived Jesse with its long-running misinformation campaign to convince the public that smoking was harmless, and that the company was thus liable for his death. (It's easy to forget that it wasn't until 1999—after the Williams verdict—that the tobacco company finally publicly admitted that smoking causes cancer.) The verdict was a rare smoker's victory. For nearly 50 years, Philip Morris had defeated an endless string of personal injury lawsuits by waging a war of attrition on the plaintiffs, a strategy perfected by the tobacco industry. As RJ Reynolds' general counsel explained in a 1988 memo, "To paraphrase General Patton, the way we won these cases was not by spending all of Reynolds' money but by making that other son of a bitch spend all his."
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