The cause to fight against conservatorship abuse in America has gained a sky-high profile this year thanks to the case of pop star Britney Spears, under a conservatorship by her own father for 13 years. While it appears that Spears’ father will finally relinquish his legal, financial, and medical control over his daughter, it’s not your typical conservatorship case – and the people who are typically trapped in the system are in dire need of rescuing. Our elected leaders must now take steps to correct a broken system that’s been made clear by the case of the 39-year-old pop star.
As the Spears case has shown, controlling the finances of an individual is serious business. Control over someone’s personal care – a guardianship – is even more serious.
In either circumstance, the ward is not in control. As you can imagine, with over one million people in America who are under the control of a guardian or conservator, there is tremendous opportunity for abuse, and the #FreeBritney movement has put a spotlight on one aspect of the system.
The problem begins with the level of control the courts allow to conservators and guardians. Oftentimes, family members who know what’s best for the ward are blocked from having any say in the decisions about the personal care or financial decisions of the ward.
Worse yet, of course, is that the temptation is great for conservators or guardians to gain so much control over the assets of a ward that they can manage them to their own benefit. In the case of professional fraudsters, the conservator might eventually liquidate the ward’s assets altogether and creatively sell them to friends or associates using a labyrinth of businesses and bank accounts.
In many cases, such as retired Alabama school teacher Marian Leonard, control over personal care and financial decisions are taken to the extreme. A court forced Mrs. Leonard into a nursing home in 2018. By the summer of 2019, according to her daughter and power-of-attorney Nancy Scott, the court-appointed guardian limited visits with Mrs. Leonard to twice a month for 90 minutes only. Scott had been fighting in the courts since the start to regain control over her mother’s care and financial decisions. When Mrs. Leonard died in hospice in June 2019, her daughter wasn’t even notified for two days.
Conservatorship and guardianship abuse can’t be achieved by one bad actor alone. An entire system supports this epidemic of abuse nationwide, sometimes unintentionally, though often deliberately. This may include judges, doctors, nursing home operators, and others.
In the case of beloved Golden Flake heiress and award-winning philanthropist Joann Bashinsky, the court has been a clear enabler of a case gone wrong. According to news accounts, Bashinsky was placed under conservatorship against her will in 2019 by the probate court after her fired bookkeeper and attorney filed an emergency petition claiming the heiress had dementia. An aggressive effort to prove the petitioners wrong ensued for 15 months until “Mrs. B” died from cardiac arrest. Her estate and grandson are still fighting the guardianship in court today, nine months after her death, with the judge still refusing to dismiss a guardianship case against a dead woman. The Alabama Supreme Court, which had previously declared the emergency petition against Mrs. Bashinsky void, is reviewing the case on a second appeal.
Of course, these are just two conservatorship and guardianship cases among countless others across the country that have come to light thanks to the Britney Spears case. There are well over 1 million Americans under some form of conservatorship or guardianship, with over $50 billion in collective assets at stake.
One measure of hope is coming from the U.S. Congress. The bipartisan Free Britney Act introduced this summer would take the financial incentive for abuse out of the system. Introduced by Representatives Charlie Crist (D, FL-13) and Nancy Mace (R, SC-01), the legislation would assign independent caseworkers to guardianship wards, empower people under guardianship the right to request a public guardian in place of a private guardian, and mandate that states create and update data regarding their residents under conservatorships.
While it’s just a start, this legislation named after the pop star now famous for her conservatorship case can help us get past Britney Spears’ case and help the far more common victims of conservatorship and guardianship abuse in America, including the 85% who are 65 years and older.
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