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The mysterious and little understood system called guardianship, or conservatorship, burst into the public consciousness in 2021 with the case of pop star Britney Spears. After living under court-ordered restrictions for nearly fourteen years, Spears finally spoke out about her plight: she had been stripped of her civil rights, forced to work, involuntarily medicated, denied the right to freely travel or spend the money she earned, and rejected when she wanted to marry and have a baby.
Britney isn’t the only adult who has lost crucial rights through the guardianship system. An estimated 1.5 and 2 million Americans are currently living under similar court-mandated circumstances. Many of these arrangements for so-called “wards of the court” work out well. But after a yearslong study of the system, author Diane Dimond discovered the number of predatory players appointed by the court to control the life and finances of wards is astounding, and the number of victims is staggering. As Dimond writes in We’re Here to Help, “Consider that every year new guardianships and conservatorships place more than $50 billion under the control of others, and with the average case lasting about six years. . . . Informed critics estimate that predatory players illegally divert multiple billions of dollars from this monstrous cache of money each year.”
Dimond insists that “the sheer numbers of these abusive cases—reported by loving family members and worried friends across the United States—screams for attention to be paid.”
We’re Here to Help reveals that:
• Anyone can file a simple petition with a state court asking that a guardianship be established. Petitioners can be family members, angry business associates, neighbors, former lovers, or total strangers.
• Those at risk include young people with inheritances; individuals who’ve won sizeable workman’s comp or medical malpractice settlements; veterans with attractive pension payouts; and victims of mental illness or brain injuries who, even after they recover, find it nearly impossible to break free from the system.
• Divorce attorneys in contested cases have counselled male clients to petition for guardianship of their uncooperative wives—and judges have complied. The cases highlighted in the book were found in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and Florida.
• Women are most affected by guardianship. As elderly widows they become ripe for conscription and their caregivers are most often their daughters, not their sons.
• Guardians give presentations at senior centers and nursing homes urging audience members not to saddle their children with caretaking responsibilities. Guardians may share contact information for those interested with estate and elder law attorneys, who pursue court ordered guardianships.
• Lawyers, guardians, and conservators operating in the guardianship field can charge between $250 and $600 an hour for tasks as mundane as opening mail, paying bills, or answering an email. They can hire any number of assistants, including financial advisors, in-home health care, cooks, landscapers, and personal shoppers. The ward’s estate pays for everything.
• Jurists often allow the guardian to ignore a ward’s will, power of attorney, and other legal documents.
• While some states are enacting reform bills to regulate the current system, there have been no proposals to overhaul it. Congress has known about guardianship’s systemic problems for nearly half a century, but no definitive legislation to curb the exploitation has ever been passed.
By highlighting a multitude of real-life stories, We’re Here to Help explains this secretive process step-by-step. Readers will come to understand how family squabbles over what to do with an at-risk relative can spiral into a complicated nightmare of unwanted court intervention.
Dimond includes chapters about alternative programs a judge could establish, and protective legal steps readers can take to help safeguard their families.
Five Questions for Diane Dimond
Qz; What is guardianship and why write a book about it? Guardianship, or conservatorship, is a system that was set up in the late 1800s and it was designed so that any citizen who couldn’t care for themselves got help from the state.
Traditionally, it protected elderly people with dementia or those with profound physical or intellectual disabilities and had no family to care for them. They became a “wards of the court.” But I discovered the system has morphed over the years into something almost sinister. Judges routinely declare all sorts of people as “incapacitated” and assign strangers—lawyers and guardians—to take control of wards’ personal lives and money. These appointees have enormous power because once a person is declared “incapacitated” they lose all their civil rights. Realize, wards can’t hire a lawyer, vote, write a check, or decide where to live or travel. They can be isolated from loved ones and, most shockingly, overmedicated to keep them compliant. Guardianships or conservatorships must be approved by a judge.
Q: Do “petitions for guardianship” state why the person in question needs to be guardianized?
Yes, but frequently a judge accepts whatever claims a lawyer has made in the petition. These might be exaggerations or outright lies; I found that’s not uncommon in these petitions. But these judges don’t have the staff or the time to vet the contents. They take the word of the officer-of-the-court and approve the guardianship. And, once a person is caught up in the system it’s very expensive—and almost impossible for their family to get them out. Court appointees love the fight because it means more time in court and more hourly fees they can charge.
Q: You’ve been writing about abusive guardianships since 2015. There have been other print and TV exposés about it. Why is it that a majority of the public doesn’t know about this system?
Because most guardianship/conservatorship proceedings are conducted in secret. The court and the players—the lawyers, the guardians, and all the rest—say the outside world cannot be privy to the inner workings because of federal HIPAA laws that protect the privacy of a person’s medical information. There have been some great exposes written and aired on individual horror stories—but never a big-picture, in-depth investigative look at the system as a whole.
Q: How did you obtain such detailed information about this secretive system?
In short, very brave family members came forward—at the risk of contempt-of-court charges and hefty fines—to tell me what their loved ones were going through. They shared horror stories about exploitive and abusive guardians: wards being isolated from the family or forcibly overmedicated, outright theft, even allegations of physical and sexual abuse. Most importantly, these relatives provided me with court documents to back up their allegations. And then they steered me to other families that had similar stories to tell. Throughout the book, you emphasize the role judges play within this system. Why should judges bear special scrutiny? To my mind, the ultimate responsibility for these obvious abuses begins and ends with the judge who ordered the guardianship in the first place. If judges need more training to truly understand what can happen after they establish a guardianship, or more money and staff to get the job done in a compassionate way, then their state legislature needs to step up. If a judge is found to be taking campaign contributions from those they appoint to these very profitable positions (and yes, I discovered that has happened), then that cash flow should be made illegal. If there are repeated complaints against a particular judge, then the state judicial board needs to seriously investigate and consider removing that judge. Think of it this way: most people plan where they want to live, travel, and how to spend their retirement. One judge shouldn’t be able to take all that away under the guise of “protection.” Some people really do need help living their life, but that doesn’t mean they should lose their civil rights or be subjected to humiliating and even criminal behavior.
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