‘The way a master owns a slave’: Court-enforced ‘guardianship’ of seniors emerges as national issue

At least 1.5 million adults in the United States are under the care of guardians and, critics say, are trapped in a flawed system which controls everything from a person’s finances to visits with family members. In North Carolina, Ginny Johnson described how, just three months after her 95-year-old father was placed in guardianship, she was locked out of the Raleigh home she had lived in for 53 years and her father was taken away. “My father was a 95-year-old healthy man when this happened,” Johnson said. “The day before dad was abducted he was on the golf course hitting golf balls with me. He had just lifted weights for 30 minutes and biked for 30 minutes.” Johnson said her father’s dying wish was that she help prevent other abuses like the ones done to him. “My father’s service in WWII was also heroic and yet he was kidnapped, robbed and murdered by our courts and legal system,” she charges. As “wards of the state,” many of America’s most vulnerable are “stripped of their individual rights, find themselves separated from friends, family members and lifelong support networks as a result of enforced isolation imposed allegedly for their ‘protection,” according to Sam Sugar, author of the best-seller “Guardianships & The Elderly: The Perfect Crime.” The American Bar Association, in a study published earlier this year, said that “guardianship is generally permanent, leaving no way out – ‘until death do us part.’ ” In many states, all that is required to become a guardian, for those who have not been convicted of a felony or recently declared bankruptcy, is taking a course. “My father was in great shape until he was warehoused by the court appointed guardian in a care center that… Read More

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Lawyer sues Netflix, area publisher and another lawyer for libel over coverage of his role in a Needham guardianship case

People need to realize the MOVIE IS based on fact and true events READ ON HERE A Cambridge lawyer is suing Netflix, the producers of its “Dirty Money” series, the Boston Broadside and an Essex County attorney for allegedly ruining his life by portraying him as an evil money grubber out to defraud an elderly Needham man who owned five derelict properties in Needham that the town had been trying to get cleaned up for 20 years. Nicholas Louisa filed his suit in Middlesex Superior Court last month but Lonnie Brennan, publisher of the Peabody-based Boston Broadside, which puts a right-wing spin on news on both a Web site and in a monthly newspaper, this week sought to have the case moved to federal court in Boston because of the First Amendment issues. At issue are articles the Broadside posted in 2019, and an episode this past spring of “Dirty Money,” that focused on the treatment of a lifelong Needham resident and property owner who now lives in a Dedham nursing home. The articles and show portrayed the man as an elderly, but still lucid, man taken advantage of by a corrupt Massachusetts guardianship system out to suck money out of his holdings, as exemplified by Louisa and various lawyers appointed by Probate Court judge to represent his interests in proceedings during which one and then all of his properties were sold, initially to pay for cleaning up the properties, eventually to pay for his nursing-home expenses. One of sources for the articles and show was Lisa Belanger, an Essex County attorney who provided them with documents from the man’s court files, even though a judge had impounded them, after she tried to intercede in his case. Belanger has been… Read More

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