Conservatorship: A Good Way to Lose Everything

Your mother is slowly losing her mind, and you’re concerned that she’s going to give away all of her money to a niece, or to your brother, or a caregiver, maybe her ex-husband, even a Nigerian prince. She’s built up quite a nest egg over the years, making her a target.

Mom needs someone to intervene before she loses everything, someone with authority beyond power of attorney for medical or financial decisions. You decide there needs to be legal intervention, so you seek out a lawyer. The lawyer files paperwork for an emergency hearing to make your mother a ward of the state who needs a legal guardian. You are confident that the judge will pick someone competent.

Probably you, right?

Then, in a surprise move, the hearing takes place, but you’re not notified. During the hearing, a judge appoints a professional guardian — sometimes called a conservator — to take over your mother’s affairs. You’ve never heard of this person, and eventually this stranger is named your mother’s permanent guardian.

The guardian now controls your mother’s finances, living arrangements, medical appointments, controlling everything from whether she can go to church to allowing visitors.

You complain to the court, and soon the guardian cuts you off. Eventually, your mother dies alone, and all of the money she planned to leave you is gone. It’s been spent paying the guardian’s fees and other “costs.” Those costs may include paying the guardian’s lawyers if you try to sue.

Maybe your mom should’ve just given her money to that Nigerian prince. At least there might be some left over.

If it sounds like a horror movie, it was. “I Really Care About You” is a 2021 Netflix film loosely based on an Arizona guardian named April Parks.

Parks was called “a predator of the worst kind.” She and her partners were accused of exploiting hundreds of her wards. During an investigation, authorities found urns containing human cremains in a storage vault. She eventually pleaded guilty to several charges and was sentenced to up to 40 years in prison.

Britney Spears famously broke free of her father’s 13-year conservatorship in 2021. In that case, the pop star’s father was given complete control over every decision, including what she could wear, where she could go, whom she could date. Britney was considered incapacitated, even though she earned millions of dollars performing nightly in Las Vegas.

More recently, there’s the hotly disputed case of former NFL player Michael Oher, whose story was made famous in “The Blind Side.” Oher claims that Sean and Leigh Anne Touhy — the people who took him in when he was in high school — misled him into thinking they adopted him. Instead, he claims they had themselves named his conservators in order to control his finances and enrich themselves. The Touhys deny this.

These cases seem isolated and rare. This can’t be common in America, right?

Well…

A new book reveals how widespread guardianships are, how often they turn out to be disastrous, how secretive the system is, and how little oversight and regulation exists. It’s called We’re Here to Help, When Guardianship Goes Wrong, and you should read it before your own mother starts to lose it (or your father, or a severely disabled child, or… you).

“The original design of guardianship is to help the really, truly vulnerable in the United States, but after investigating this topic for eight years, I’ve discovered that way too often, it doesn’t protect,” says Diane Dimond, a veteran investigative journalist who authored the book. She’s also a friend of mine, and when she first told me about the book, I found it hard to believe. I didn’t want to believe it.

Diane says her research turned up case after case where guardians abused and exploited the people they’re supposed to help. The system is like a “Hotel California” — once you check in, you can almost never leave.

Diane explains here:

How Guardianship Works

First, let’s be clear. There are many compassionate, competent conservators and guardians. “Every citizen should applaud the work that public guardians perform on behalf of the indigent, as their selfless compassion is evident,” Diane writes. “Those guardians earn a small state-supplied stipend for taking care of the poor who have no one else to assist them.”

However, she also writes that in addition to public guardians, “every state has a system whereby a judge can bypass willing family members and appoint a professional for-profit guardian or conservator to supervise the life of an at-risk person.” Many of these for-profit guardians also do a good job.

But some don’t, and their abuse plays out behind closed doors, like some time warp into another century. “Once in the system, the ward has fewer rights than a prisoner on death row,” Diane tells me.

It’s very easy to become a guardian. You may have to take a few classes, but only three states require a license — Alaska, California and Nevada. “Your hairdresser, or the man who comes to do the plumbing in your house,” Diane says, “has more government oversight and licensing than a guardian does.”

She explains that when someone is put into guardianship, “all of their money and property are confiscated and put into the name of the guardian — or conservator — who’s been appointed by the court.” (Different states call them different names — but guardian and conservator are essentially the same thing.)

The guardian charges a fee to manage the person’s affairs, a fee that can be hundreds of dollars an hour. They’re granted almost total control over a person’s movements, activities, and contact with the outside world. They may even be able to alter a will or estate plan.

“Guardians are so powerful that they can put someone in a nursing home and order that they be medicated [or] overmedicated,” Diane says. “I found case after case where family members discovered that their loved one was put away in a facility and was a walking zombie.”

The average guardianship lasts six years. Sometimes the ward becomes healthy enough to convince a judge that conservatorship is no longer needed (good luck!), sometimes the ward dies, and Diane says sometimes the arrangement ends because “all the money’s gone.”

Guardianship cases are heard in equity courts, which are different from criminal or civil courts. “Pennsylvania calls it the Widows and Orphans Court,” Diane says. Usually the court hearings are closed to the public or media because of HIPAA laws protecting privacy. But over the years Diane kept digging, forcing her way into proceedings — and getting kicked out. Her book reveals a web of lawyers, guardians, judges, assisted living facilities, and others, often working together. “They don’t want the system to change.”

Nobody really knows how many Americans are under the control of guardians. A bill to examine guardianship laws estimates the number is 1.3 million. Each state runs its own program, and there’s no national database. “We can tell you how many missing vehicles there are, or how many missing children,” Diane tells me, “but we can’t tell you how many people have been stripped of their civil rights, declared incapacitated, and put under this court-ordered system.”

And how much money is under the control of guardians? The best guess is $50 billion. “Is it any wonder that people with dollar signs in their eyes, or crime on their minds, are attracted to work in this system?” Diane asks.

It sounds un-American and unbelievable.

Diane thought so, too. Until she got a phone call.

A Couple of Examples

Nancy Herrmann-Hart was a childhood friend of Diane’s from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She called Diane about 10 years ago because she was concerned about her ailing father, Dr. Jack Herrmann, whom Diane remembered. “He was a dynamic man,” Diane recalls. “He would do volunteer work at the prisons, and he was just a fabulous guy.” Dr. Herrmann also built up a fortune worth millions of dollars, and Nancy believed some of her siblings were taking financial advantage of him.

She’d gone to an attorney, who went to court seeking an emergency guardianship for her father. The request was approved by the judge — without a hearing, without witnesses, without Nancy, without Dr. Herrmann.

Nancy suddenly discovered that her 87-year-old dad’s life was being “handled by strangers” who sent him to a new doctor. “Round-the-clock nurses were hired,” Diane writes. “Then a landscaper was employed to water the doctor’s few outdoor plants, many of which had withered long before in the hot southwestern sun.” The guardian hired other people for other tasks, all being paid out of Dr. Herrmann’s estate. When Nancy and a brother started asking questions, the guardian went to court and had them banned from seeing their father.

“I thought, ‘Come on, this can’t be happening,’” Diane says, “but it happens all the time.”

Eventually Dr. Herrmann died, and Diane says there was very little money left over for his heirs.

The investigative journalist in her took over, and Diane started writing about the guardianship system in The Albuquerque Journal. “The floodgates opened,” she says, as other families with similar stories reached out.

For example, Diane discovered the case of 75-year-old Steven Stryker, a Florida veteran who at some point became a ward of professional guardian Rebecca Fierle. Diane tells the story here:

Fierle had about 400 wards in total. It was a lot for one person to manage. Too much, as it turns out. “She put ‘DNRs’ — ‘Do Not Resuscitates’ — on all of them,” Diane says.

That included Stryker, who had difficulty breathing, a condition that sometimes landed him in the hospital. Not only did Fierle have a DNR for Stryker during what turned out to be his last hospitalization, she also ordered that his feeding tube be capped.

He died.

That’s when authorities finally took action, and Fierle was arrested. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement found that Stryker, her ward, “did not want a do not resuscitate order (DNR) and stated several times that he wanted to live.”

Audits reportedly revealed that Fierle had allegedly taken $4 million in questionable fees she never reported to the court, and she was soon dubbed “Florida’s most notorious guardian.”

Prosecutors wanted jail time, but after she pleaded no contest to a culpable negligence charge, she was given four years probation.

What Can be Done?

Previous congressional efforts to regulate guardianships at the national level have failed. “There was a law passed in 2017 called ‘The Elder Prevention and Prosecution Act,’” Diane says. The law mandates that the Justice Department designate a special prosecutor in every region of the country to monitor the guardianship system, but Diane says only three cases have been prosecuted, “and that’s only because the guardians were dumb enough to steal federal funds like Social Security.”

Diane believes the federal government needs to get serious about the issue and stand up to industry lobbyists. In the meantime, her book outlines some ways to avoid or mitigate the need for a guardian. For example, if you’re concerned about an ailing parent or disabled sibling, “Get the family together and discuss it,” no matter how difficult that may be. “Go to mediation, if you need to go to mediation, before you turn to the legal system.”

She also highlights one alternative to guardianship called “supportive decision-making.” Create a network of people to help a potential ward make decisions, “especially people who have Down Syndrome or cerebral palsy,” who are still very capable in many ways.

Another suggestion is to have periodic reviews of guardians. A famous Broadway producer named David Merrick was put under the control of a guardian after suffering a stroke, but when he recovered, he and his wife had to fight in court to convince a judge to remove him from guardianship.

After Diane’s series of newspaper stories, the state of New Mexico created new rules mandating annual reports from guardians and easier access for families to petition the courts. Her work helped trigger a state audit of conservatorships that discovered assets which weren’t being accounted for, conflicting information, checks written directly to conservators, “or conservators charging large fees for services or reimbursements of expenses.”

Ultimately, Diane says the equity courts making these decisions need attention (and probably more funding). “Judges stand as the creators of guardianships,” she writes. “They must be held accountable for what their chosen appointees do…because it just gets worse every single year.”