Join Coz & Marti tonight as we highlight more of the “Ottholes on Parade”. Joining us will be Elaine Mickman and “Rebecca”.
Thanks to Judge Stanley Ott, some of the Ottholes have 100’s of “wards of the state”. Individuals who have been targeted, kidnapped, isolated and now are subjected to trauma based bonding. No one can visit them. No one can talk to them. No one can know what condition their health is in. The predators assure them that only THEY care….after all….no one else is visiting them. Of course they don’t tell the victim that they won;t allow anyone else to visit them. And could someone please explain to us how one guardian can possibly manage all the life decisions, medical care and financial decisions for hundreds of people that they themselves rarely if ever see or communicate with?
We will also be discussing the coming Montgomery County,Pennsylvania elections and the attacks coming from the courts on women involved in divorce.
Join us this evening as Gretchen Rachel Hammond returns! We have lot to talk about!
We will be discussing the do’s and don’ts of survivors of guardianship abuse and, the failure of agencies to act when a crime is reported to them with evidence. It would appear, it is only a crime if someone outside the inner circle does it. If it is one of these tribunal participants like probate examiners, guardians, attorneys and others who routinely traffic the elderly and disabled through these kangaroo courts, nothing will be done. The police won’t respond, nor will any agency whose sole existence is supposed to be making sure these things don’t happen no matter who does it! Obviously if you are connected to these rackets no one will make a move against you.
Gretchen will also speak about her new position with the National Association to Stop Guardian Abuse (NASGA) where she will head up Community Outreach. After her year long investigation on the massive abuses taking place in Michigan probate tribunals, Gretchen is off on a new endeavor!
Guardian abuse came about from a broken system. States often provide guardians for when the elderly and incapacitated need outside care. County or state courts appoint them to take care of their wards either personally or financially.
But the system failed thousands of people by allowing dishonest people and corrupt politicians to handle guardianship. Public guardians cut off wards from communication with their families, charge massive fees, and in some cases, cause the death of their wards.
A System Motivated By Greed
Not all guardians commit these atrocities. However, more and more victims report guardian abuse every day.
“It’s nothing personal, it’s all about the money,” says Charlie Pascal, whose mother-in-law was a victim. “That’s what I tell all the victims. You have to get past it.”
The National Association to Stop Guardian Abuse (NASGA) writes that guardianship laws threaten “the health and wealth to our elderly and disabled citizens.” Director Elaine Renoire said that while people are working to pass laws, “legislation is slow moving, so we’re still at it.”
Guardianships For No Reason
The system supposedly helps those that need it. But what happens when those that don’t get caught?
When Mary Whitten and her sister, Cos Skaife, dealt with their uncle’s guardianship in the State of Pennsylvania, they had no idea how much was involved. The two collected horror stories of wards over-medicated and isolated from their families by unscrupulous guardians.
On May 2, 2016, my mother and I fled from her Minnesota guardian and Judge who collaborated with attorneys to create a guardianship based on a fraudulent diagnosis. The only thing wrong with my mother was that she had two sons that continually pursued her, at the expense of her life and her health, for control of her estate. As a result of family discord, the racketeers banded together to create a lucrative guardianship. After my mother suffered isolation and inappropriate drugging with the judge’s approval for almost two years, we determined the only way out was to run, and run we did! My mother and I are currently living in exile in Greece; the country she immigrated from.
Her guardian, Dan Lodahl, principle of First Fiduciary Corporation (City of Eagan) has many complaints against him. These complaints are well known throughout Minnesota, but are consistently and systematically ignored and hidden from the public. Mr. Lodahl and his wife, Michelle Lodahl, use unethical billing practices while forcing wards to submit to their demands through false imprisonment, isolation, and inappropriate drug ingestion to promote unconsciousness and early death. Dan Lodahl is the Jared Shafer (Nevada) of Minnesota: untouchable.
My mother recently told a reporter, “When my husband died, everyone came after me just because they could. I had a life, a home, money; they took everything.” Family members, attorneys, a physician, a Judge, a guardian and assisted living facility staff perpetrated incomprehensible cruelty against my mother and I. We are law abiding citizens, professionals in our field, that are now fugitives seeking refuge from criminals.
For three years, as the guardian and judge fraudulently denied knowledge of my mother’s whereabouts, my mother was completely dependent on my VA disability for all her living and medical expenses. The guardian continued to bill her estate thousands of dollars for his salary and expenses that he created without a ward in his jurisdiction. The guardian did everything in his power to deny my mother’s request for her social security income, which she finally received in 2019. He had, and has, no concern for the welfare of ‘his ward.’ She is simply a cash cow.
Despite notifications to the guardian of his ward’s location, he and the judge continue to declare her as missing hoping to make it to the four-year requirement in Minnesota that allows them to designate a missing person as deceased (Death in Absentia). This would give them faster access to her estate in probate court, which they can utilize to deplete her entire estate to fill their own pockets.
Although we are free, we will never truly be free. After a lifetime of dedication to her work, and carefully saving for her future security and that of her children, my mother cannot afford to live the life she worked for. She lost everything to guardianship. I lost everything to save her. Our losses are much deeper than financial; we cannot spend our senior years with our children and grandchildren and we cannot live the life we planned. We live in constant fear of being pursued. We are forced to live a life in exile while unwillingly relinquishing control of my parent’s estate and family legacy. We cannot return to the United States or I will be sentenced to jail and my mother will be forced back into human trafficking.
Currently, the only way out of guardianship is to let the racketeers steal your estate, accept defeat, and escape the country to regain your freedom – your life.
ALLEGED MASSIVE ELDER ABUSE AND EXPLOITATION RING IN MIGHIGAN PROBATE COURTS
The guardianship system isn’t new; in fact, it’s rooted in medieval English law. Every US state still uses some form of the system, which, at its best, is designed to protect citizens who are no longer able to protect themselves by declaring them wards of the state. We know, of course, that the system is rarely at its best, with increasing reports of abuse cropping up nationwide, prompting Congressional calls for reform.
But the level of controversy over how guardianship cases are handled in one Detroit-area probate courtroom has reached such heights, the story reads more like Orwellian fiction than it does a model of the American experience.
An unsettling number of accusations have been leveraged against the court, citing abuse, neglect, robbery, and exploitation, often in cases that arguably didn’t merit guardianship in the first place. In as little as a year, “incapacitated wards” are stripped of the entirety of their savings and possessions and rendered completely reliant upon social services and benefits such as Medicaid. Even high-profile families, including the estates of Rosa Parks and Aretha Franklin, have been drawn into the quagmire.
Award-winning investigative journalist Gretchen Rachel Hammond spent the past 13 months independently investigating a systemic problem at the Oakland County Probate Court, which has allegedly been shielded by the highest levels of Michigan government for the past 30-some years. With the help of a forensic accountant, three Wayne State University Journalism School researchers, and thousands of corroborating documents, she has published a first-of-its-kind exploration into the court system, its four judges, four guardians, and the stories behind more than 2,200 wards.
Background:
In July 2018, Hammond engaged in a freelance, self-funded investigation to determine if alleged abuses at the Oakland County Probate Court were systemic.
Discoveries include the forced separation of families and isolation of the vulnerable; fraudulent petitions for guardianship by Adult Protective Services investigators; massive overbilling; the forced removal of individuals from their homes and the placement of them in nursing facilities or unlicensed group homes with subhuman living conditions; real estate fraud; and missing assets that number in the millions of dollars.
The investigation met with constant challenges, including threats and harassment by Oakland County Sheriff’s officers. A surreal March 12, 2019 four-hour meeting between Hammond’s team and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s staff led to a new line of inquiry and discoveries of campaign ties between Nessel, Whitmer and Oakland County Probate Court Chief Judge Kathleen Ryan and her family.
Biography
Gretchen Rachel Hammond is an award-winning freelance investigative journalist based out of Chicago. Her work has won or been nominated for four successive Chicago Press Club awards, been recognized by the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Journalists (NLGJA), and covered topics such as criminal justice, abuse at ICE detention facilities, and alleged discrimination on the part of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services leading to the unnecessary separation of children from their parents.
GRETCHEN IS AVAIL FOR INTERVIEW AND THE FULL 5 PART SERIES IS AVAIL
A Michigan court tasked with protecting its most vulnerable citizens has become home to a roiling controversy charging abuse, exploitation, robbery and neglect.
According to state and national activists, it’s a system that has been left unchecked for decades and is now so broken that it has led to unprecedented judicial overreach and the eradication of the constitutional, civil and human rights of thousands of Americans who have suffered from resulting neglect, isolation, abuse, torture and theft on a massive scale, allegedly at the hands of the same individuals assigned to protect them.
Both in Michigan and nationwide, the system is called “guardianship” and/or “conservatorship.” Once assigned to an individual that a probate or family court judge declares “legally incapacitated” and unable to manage their own affairs, often a complete stranger in the form of a court-appointed guardian or conservator assumes control over every aspect of that person’s life.
Every last possession, penny and decision is handed over to one of Michigan’s professional guardians and conservators culled from a pool of county public administrators, estate and probate attorneys or private guardianship companies.
In as little as a year, wards have been rendered completely indigent and reliant upon social services and benefits such as Medicaid. Their homes are gone, as are their savings accounts, IRAs, investment accounts, cars, personal belongings, keepsakes, heirlooms, jewelry and even their clothing. Every dollar of their social security, disability income or pensions falls under the control of their guardians with the exception of an allowance as low as $60 per month.
Inevitably, it’s the developmentally disabled and exponentially growing senior populations who are the most affected not only in Michigan but nationwide. Advocates for both groups claim that guardianship, by design, results in a “civil death” for those who are subjected to it and that, although free from any charges of wrongdoing, a person under guardianship has less rights than an imprisoned felon.
Pro-guardianship organizations claim such statements are histrionic; that a guardian has simply assumed the rights of an incapacitated individual, also called a “ward,” as a protective barrier against those who would exploit them. More
The admission sounded like something out of “Logan’s Run” or other dystopian sci-fi movie, not an explanation one would expect to hear from legal associates. Nancy Scott and others who joined her in a peaceful prayer vigil for her mother’s life on Tuesday, August 20, were stunned when representatives from the court-appointed guardian’s office explained that the reason that retired Alabama schoolteacher Marian Leonard was on hospice was because she was old.
According to Medicare.gov, hospice care is supposed to be for people who are certified by a hospice doctor and the patient’s regular doctor that they are terminally ill with a “life expectancy of 6 months or less.” Hospice care is palliative, or “comfort” care, rather than curative care, and it is supposed to be a choice that the patient makes, not a decision thrust upon them without their consent.
That is not what has happened with Marian Leonard. When the state seized guardianship of Mrs. Leonard in February 2018 at the request of St. Vincent’s Hospital and the Department of Human Resources (DHR), she was forced into a nursing home, Diversicare of Riverchase, and forced onto hospice care, against her will and that of her designated Power of Attorney, her daughter Nancy Scott. More
I have been hosting an internet radio show for about eight years most of which has been dedicated to exposing the ongoing trafficking of the elderly and the disabled with no other intent than to disinherit families by seizing the accumulated assets of someone else’s life’s work by professional predators. The result of these criminal acts, are the robbed and traumatized victims and family’s and the greatest transfer of wealth ever witnessed in this country. When government studies are done such as those by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) they look at only those cases that will support the contention that it is family or friends who commit these acts, without ever alluding to or even acknowledging the massive number of cases of guardianship and conservator abuses by professionals who make their living preying on the elderly who have committed the new age crime of aging with assets.
Having called your agency numerous times, and, after hearing from numerous other individuals attempting to report to your agency the human trafficking of the elderly and disabled by predators who operate as professional “guardians”, “conservators” and “attorneys” across the country, I am appalled by your lack of action on this issue. I suppose I shouldn’t be, after all, your agency is populated by individuals who are also BAR Association members and none of this human trafficking has happened without great efforts by BAR members to pass arbitrary and unconstitutional statutes in every state that allow them to traffic the elderly and disabled without penalty. The associated professional guardians also profit handsomely from targeting elderly victims and seizing their assets. And, during this process their bank accounts, property holdings and assets of all kinds are exponentially increased as they avail themselves of every possible dime in the estate with padded billings, spurious and inflated charges of all kinds, and repeated motions in these tribunals which of course is an absolute gold mine for siphoning money off the estate.
You do know, don’t you, that the targeted victim’s estate is forced to pay for every action brought against it. I liken this to having to pay for weaving the rope they are going to hang you with.
Maybe you could explain to me:
How the living, breathing human being is forced to suffer a statutory civil death, equal in its legal consequences to a physical death, and then:
have their identity taken from them and assigned to a known predator, who now assumes and presents themselves as the victim, along with all their assets?
Why is it that in these tribunals, the rules of evidence do not have to be adhered to?
Why does the code of civil procedure not apply?
Why is due process never adhered to?
Why are ex parte hearings allowed to occur without notice to the family or the victim?
Why are these professional predators allowed to levy charges of all kinds against the victim and the family and friends without ever producing any evidence that the charges are in fact valid?
Why are they never asked for such evidence?
Why is no evidence allowed to be entered into the record of the tribunal refuting the claims of the predators?
And why is the victim forced to pay for the actions brought against them when no crime has been committed, there is no injured party and no damage to property that the predator does not own or have an interest in….yet.
