Harvard University has agreed to pay out $53 million to settle a lawsuit after one of its employees was accused of selling the bodies and organs of their loved ones on the black market.
From the New York Post:
Harvard University will pay $53 million to settle a ghoulish class-action suit brought by families claiming an imprisoned former morgue manager at the Ivy League institution mishandled the bodies of their loved ones donated to its medical school and even sold their body parts on the black market.
A state court judge in Boston preliminarily approved the eight-figure settlement Tuesday in the suit stemming from the 2023 arrest of disgraced former Harvard Medical School’s morgue manager, Cedric Lodge.
Lodge, who worked at Harvard’s morgue for nearly 30 years, was arrested in 2023 and ultimately sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling organs and body parts of cadavers donated to the school for medical research purposes.
As far back as 2018, Lodge had been stealing body parts — including “heads, faces, brains, skin and hands” — which he’d then bring to his home in New Hampshire and sell with his wife, prosecutors said, shipping them to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
In one horrifying example heard during his trial, Lodge provided skin to a buyer so it could be tanned into leather and bound into a book, which Assistant U.S. Attorney Alisan Martin called a “deeply horrifying reality” in a court filing.
“In another, Cedric and Denise Lodge sold a man’s face — perhaps to be kept on a shelf, perhaps to be used for something even more disturbing,” Martin said.
His wife was sentenced to just over a year in prison for assisting him.
The dozens of family members involved in the suit accused the school of negligence, contending it knew of Lodge’s grotesque side business but ignored it until his 2023 indictment.
A judge initially dismissed the cases, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court revived them in October, saying the families’ claims were sufficient to indicate the university acted in poor faith in handling the bodies, which were subjected to “horrific and undignified treatment” for years.
including, at this very moment, a scandal at the harvard morgue where an employee lied about cremating bodies and SOLD DONATED BODY PARTS to random people. he was caught because of around $30k in paypal transactions including one that just said "braaaaaains"
— jamie loftus 🌭 (@jamieloftusHELP) October 29, 2024
This macabre story started in June 2023 when federal prosecutors indicted Lodge, his wife, and others for pilfering human remains from the cadavers. Between 2018 and 2020, he removed organs, brains, skin, hands, faces, dissected heads, according to the Justice Department.
🚨 HARVARD PAYS $53M SETTLEMENT
— John Kennedy (@john_kennedy75) August 19, 2026
Harvard agreed to pay $53M to families after its former morgue manager stole donated body parts—including brains, skin, and heads—and sold them online.
Manager Cedric Lodge was sentenced to 8 years in prison. pic.twitter.com/g5PGhpbC1N
He took the remains without permission to his home in New Hampshire where he and his wife began selling them. They sold and shipped the remains to buyers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and other states.
The New York Times reported that Lodge sometimes allowed buyers into the morgue to pick out the parts they wanted. These included two dissected faces sold for $600 in October 2020. One repeat customer transferred more than $37,000 in payments that included memos reading “head number 7” and “braiiiiiins.”