Mary Jannotta sliced meat and cheese behind deli counters at Acme and Pathmark supermarkets in the Philadelphia suburbs for decades, developing aches that came with working on her feet. A botched back surgery in 2008 made the pain worse. Her doctor repeatedly prescribed OxyContin, Purdue Pharma’s marquee painkiller — the high-dose opioid the company later admitted it criminally marketed and distributed.

Jannotta said she soon became dependent on opioids. Cut off by her doctors, she found her way to Kensington, home of Philadelphia’s dangerous open-air drug market, to score pills. She eventually lost her car, her home — and her grandson. Tyler Cordeiro first pilfered Jannotta’s prescription pills as a teenager. He was 24 when he died of an overdose.

When Purdue filed for bankruptcy in 2019, Jannotta, along with nearly 140,000 other people, filed claims against the company for the harm they said its drugs caused. Though the money could not bring back what they lost, a financial settlement represented an opportunity to get justice from the company and its multibillionaire owners, the Sackler family.

Then they waited. The Supreme Court in 2024 rejected the first bankruptcy settlement because it shielded the Sacklers from future lawsuits. Finally, last November, a federal judge approved a new plan that would allow the payouts to start.

But this $7.4 billion bankruptcy plan — including $870 million that has been set aside for individual victims — will shut out tens of thousands of those who originally applied for a settlement, ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer found. Fewer than half of those who filed claims against Purdue will get any kind of help under the new plan, despite the company touting it as “the only opioid settlement to date that meaningfully compensates individual victims.”

Court records show the new plan slashed payments for victims, imposed tougher eligibility requirements and eliminated compensation for teenagers who bought Purdue drugs on the street. Estimated settlement amounts for people whose family members fatally overdosed dropped to as little as $8,000; the previous payout for an OxyContin death had been $48,000.

Most significantly, the new plan removed a key provision that allowed victims to submit a sworn affidavit, in lieu of a prescription or other medical or legal records, to prove they purchased Purdue opioids.

Similar sworn statements have been permitted in other major bankruptcy cases — such as those driven by sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church — to account for harm done years earlier where physical evidence is scant or impossible to obtain.

Several victims told ProPublica and the Inquirer that the loss of the affidavit option meant they had no hope of receiving a settlement. Purdue sold painkillers for decades, and, while laws vary by state, generally doctors, hospitals and pharmacies must keep prescription records for only a few years.

“I can’t turn up prescriptions for my son back when he was young, years ago,” Michigan resident Ellen Isaacs said. “They’re not available anymore.”

Her son, Ryan, died from an overdose at 33 in 2018 in Florida, the result of an addiction she said began when he was prescribed OxyContin after a high school injury.

The changes between the initial and revised settlement agreements were negotiated out of the public eye for months, with key details later scattered across thousands of pages of court filings, hearing transcripts and sworn declarations. To date, they have not received any media attention or public scrutiny. The winnowing of victims has been the result of byzantine legal procedures, strict vetting and tightened eligibility rules, which victims told ProPublica and the Inquirer took them by surprise.

To receive compensation, victims also have had........

© ProPublica