Bayer convinced a federal judge to throw out part of a lawsuit brought by its shareholders who claim they were gypped when the company acquired Monsanto.

U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg, of the Northern District of California, on May 18 ruled on Bayer’s motion to dismiss a class action that was spawned by the thousands of lawsuits against Bayer and Monsanto that said weedkiller Roundup’s active ingredient glyphosate causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The decision takes away claims Bayer misled shareholders with its claims regarding its science-based arguments that it made when fighting personal injury lawsuits.

Seeborg’s earlier ruling that denied a first motion to dismiss relied on a 2002 internal Monsanto email in which its head of product safety strategy stated “Glyphosate is OK but the formulated product *and thus the surfactant) does the damage.”

“Although this email demonstrated that Monsanto employees were aware that Roundup and Monsanto were not one and the same in terms of their safety risks,” Seeborg wrote in the May 18 ruling, “Plaintiffs have presented scant support for their arguments that statements Bayer executives made in 2018 and later were made with ‘either intentionally or with deliberate recklessness.’