Conservatorship Abuse 2.0

Source: Karla Hernandez/Unsplash

It was almost seven years ago when my father unexpectedly died of cancer and everything changed. It happened fast and shortly after he passed, my mom had to be conserved. Back then I didn’t know much about conservatorships, but after almost two years of battling her conservator in multiple court hearings in the Stanley Mosk Superior Courthouse in LA, I was able to successfully remove him.

Conservatorships can be a lucrative industry driven by a multi-layered group of players. I later found out that my mom’s first conservator, who inflicted financial and psychological abuse on her, worked with a larger network of compliant and complicit participants in a fraudulent system. Judges, court-appointed counsel, doctors, attorneys, and home-care companies (just to name a handful) all seem to work in conjunction to for profit, while the conservatee is often left to suffer.

I like to refer to the network as the “conservatorship cartel.”

I thought I had beaten the system and had it all figured out. Once he was replaced with another court-appointed conservator, I assumed that I had “won,” so to speak, and that her new conservator wouldn’t be a player in this game.

I was wrong.

Recently, we had an accounting hearing and the lawyers requested an extension, which they always manage to do, and it was granted. The financial abuse and spending are atrocious. The bleeding of the estate is tragic, and not much has changed since the first round of conservatorship abuse. Although I have written several posts and a book on this topic, I sit here now stuck in the same web of corruption.

Families all over the country have suffered from some form of conservatorship abuse, yet experience has taught me that not many of them want to share how things got to this point. To be honest, I didn’t fully disclose all the details about how this occurred in my family, but I can point out that when you have a family not able to work together they quickly become prey to the surrounding abusive vultures.

This was our sad fate, but it could have been avoided. If I were to attribute the primary forces that resulted in my mom being conserved by a private fiduciary conservator, it would be a lack of communication, and family issues that ran deep for years that were never addressed. We lacked the skill set necessary to come together, which is shameful. Not all families want to air their dirty laundry; however, it’s important to be aware of the intricacies within the family in order to prevent the conservatorship trap. It also would have been helpful if there was a plan put in place years ago, but that never happened.

So, the underlying question remains: How did we end up in a position where we couldn’t work together and communicate?

You’d have to go back years to unveil all the deep-seated family drama that landed us in this situation in the first place. It didn’t happen overnight. Often in families, you have the haves and the have-nots. There are sibling rivalries, favoritism, and grudges, and you are met with an array of issues that can lead to dysfunction. The term dysfunctional family is not easy to acknowledge nor accept, but if I am being transparent it laid the groundwork for ending up in this unfortunate circumstance. Sadly, when there are problematic concerns embedded in the dynamics of a family it eventually can all come to a head, and upon a death in the family or a turn of events, it can prompt a conservatorship that can lead to destruction and things can get worse.

Now, what can you do?

If my family had a mediator early on to intervene and sit down with all of us to try and figure things out, this might have been avoided, but even then we’d all have had to agree to it and I can’t say with confidence that would have been the case. Either way, it’s important to try to find a way to heal those wounds so you can overcome potential disasters and not end up in a conservatorship nightmare. Try to have a professional step in and conduct a family therapy session to weather any storm that might impede a family from maintaining control before a conservator swoops in and takes over. Have those tough conversations with your loved ones about what should happen when someone passes, and put a plan in place which includes conversations about money, assets, wills, trusts, and especially a long-term care plan.

Anyone can fall victim to a corrupt conservator and become a target for abuse. It affects families of all socio-economical backgrounds, races, and religions; it does not discriminate. Do your best to open up the lines of communication with your loved ones before things unravel, and you might be one step ahead of avoiding conservatorship corruption down the line.