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Feb. 27, 2024 - Lionel Nation
55:58
The Horrors of Guardianship: Diane Dimond on True Stories You Will Not Believe Are Even Possible
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You know how they always say on TV, I'm so honored.
I'm so honored.
Well, they don't mean it.
I'm honored because I've known this woman for...
So long since the OJ.
I know.
Listen, I'm proud of that.
Since the Coolidge administration.
It was during Teapot Dome.
I'll never forget that.
It was great.
No, but during the OJ days when that was the greatest spectacle.
Can you imagine, Diane, if we had had social media during OJ?
Oh my gosh.
No.
Twitter would have been broken.
They would have also not needed us.
In any event, let me explain to you.
This is the book.
And I want you to look at this.
We're here to help when guardianship goes wrong by Diane Diamond.
I will have a link to this.
We're here to help.
Now, let me say this, and I love you, and my wife loves you, but when you tell somebody, you've got to hear this about guardianship and conservatorship, they look at you like, what?
That's like saying, you know, 10B5 blue sky litigation.
No.
This is tantamount to, I think, a 13th Amendment violation.
This is slavery.
This is civil rights.
First, let's go to this.
When guardianship goes wrong, give me the premise.
How did you get into it?
And give us an intro as to what we're talking about here.
People haven't heard about it because the whole system, this part of the judicial system, is secret.
It is the system that ensnared Britney Spears for almost 14 years.
It is called guardianship in most states, but conservatorship, like in California and a couple of other states.
And what it is, briefly, is the court decides whether or not somebody is...
An incapacitated ward of the court.
And if they decide that you are, because someone's given them a petition spelling out why you are, then you are stripped of all your civil rights.
The court immediately seizes all of your property, money, investments, and puts all of that into the name of a court-appointed guardian.
Now, if it's a member of your family who loves you dearly and knows what you want out of life and you have a little dementia or something, it's great.
Guardianship is great on paper, Lionel.
It's not great in practice because people who don't need guardianship are conscripted into it.
People who do need a little help get this very strict system controlling every aspect of their life when really they might just need help paying bills or getting to the store.
No.
All their civil rights are taken away.
I think, Lionel, this is really the most under-discussed civil rights issue of our time because it's not just Britney Spears.
Two million people live under this very strict guardianship judicial system right now as I'm sitting here talking to you.
You mentioned something that, you know, it sounds good.
Let me give people an analogy.
Adoption is good, right?
Yeah, it is.
What if you were adopted and you didn't know it?
All of a sudden you say, who is this?
This is your new family.
Then you'd say, wait a minute, you can't do that.
That's what this is.
This sounds good.
It can be done.
It's like divorce can be good unless you get yourself caught into it.
A lot of things sound good.
But guardianship, even the name of your guardian, guardian angel for those recovering and retired Catholics like me.
It's a guardian.
But here is the thing which is the most important.
The people who can initiate this, number one, and here's the best part, getting out of it, number two, and we're going to forget all of my numbers, but let me pretend we're keeping track of this.
What is, explain to me that level, and by the way, you probably know more about this than any lawyer does because they may know the particular procedures of how you do it, but Diane...
How far can you go with being so demented, so crazy, so whatever, that you cannot take care of yourself, as opposed to you being just eccentric?
Or you living a lifestyle like that weird aunt that we have, or a famous celebrity?
But they somehow do okay.
What's that point of no return?
Well, that's a really good question.
And people need to understand that guardianship starts when somebody goes to a lawyer and says, hey, this person is crazy, or they have dementia, or they have a psychological problem, or this person lives with a disability, can't take care of themselves.
What should I do?
And the attorney, I don't mean to disparage attorneys like you, but the attorneys most often say, hey, I've got the panacea.
It's called guardianship.
We're here to help you.
Well, the person who wants to guardianize someone else can be anybody.
It could be a total stranger.
It could be a real estate agent who wants your property.
It could be an angry ex-business partner or lover.
It could be a disgruntled member of your own family.
It could be anybody.
And so the lawyer writes up this petition, and I have investigated this for eight years before I wrote this book.
And I'm telling you, a huge percentage of these petitions contain outright lies.
Like, Your Honor, this older woman has to be guardianized because her daughter stole a million dollars, and she has dementia.
Whoa.
The woman doesn't have dementia, and the daughter didn't steal a million dollars, but it's in the paper that the judge got.
Let me do this.
Let me beg your forgiveness as I interrupt.
Compared to a regular lawsuit of sorts, I file a complaint, you file an answer, then we go to court.
What you're saying is, let's say Diane Diamond loaded.
And I am somebody who just...
I may not even be somebody you know.
I just come across this.
Just like a squatter.
You notice how all of a sudden we have squatters?
Like, where did this come from?
So I say, guess what?
I found out there's this Diane Diamond lady.
And I just filed this thing.
I'm going to go into a circuit court or whatever.
And I'm going to file this.
And I'm going to ask.
Now, can I ask to be your guardian?
Or that a guardianship set up?
And that whoever takes care of it.
So I am right now saying, this woman, Diane Diamond, is crazy.
I don't have to show you, post any bond or explain what are the bases, some threshold statement.
And I want to be the guardian.
And how long do I become guardian?
What are my fees for being guardian?
And what is your ability to rebut that, considering the fact that you're crazy and demented?
And who's going to listen to you anyway?
And is there a judge who's going to run for re-election who says, I don't want to be the one who denied.
If this woman goes out and kills her, I should.
And by the way, this is my court and we do this a lot.
So anyway, a lot of questions.
A lot of questions there.
Where to start?
Okay.
So, yes, if you file the petition, say...
God forbid, I don't know your situation, but say your mother or your disabled brother needs help and you file a petition with the court.
Lionel wants to be the guardian.
I'm a family member.
I know what my disabled brother wants.
Name me as guardian.
More and more, I discovered these judges are not assigning loving, trusted family members.
They are being told that the family is troublemakers and dysfunctional and so total strangers.
For-profit professional guardians are appointed.
Up to $600 an hour they charge for, like, taking a phone call or opening your mail.
Remember, your whole life comes into the control of the guardian.
Once you're a ward, you can't spend your own money, decide where you're going to live, you can't vote, you can't marry, you can't decide who's going to come and visit you, what doctors you need.
You can't vote.
You are stripped of yourself.
You're incapacitated.
How can you vote?
How can you hire your own attorney to come and fight for you?
In most states, all but about three, I think, you cannot hire your own attorney to fight this for you.
So it's this catch-22.
You get into court, and it's a double-cross.
It is a complete double-cross.
You think you're going to be the guardian, but you're not, because the judge has this whole cadre of friends out there, and he starts to appoint.
But also what's interesting is this.
The 13th Amendment, by the way, is the only constitutional amendment that provides, that allows us, here we go, and I'll see your diamond, and I'll hold up the Constitution for this.
But there is a, the 13th Amendment is the only constitutional provision that can be committed, that can be violated by a private citizen.
Everything else has to be the government, except for the 13th.
That's slavery.
So what they do is, they take diamond in the person, and we strip you, Of all of those, you know, age of majority, age of reason, you are a, you're not Diane Diamond Citizen, you're Diane Diamond Ward.
You're dead in the eyes of the law.
Yes.
And you may not ever be resuscitated and lose this, because, by the way, this is not a punitive thing.
You're not adjudicated guilty.
You're just a ward.
We're here to help you.
We're here to help, okay?
Okay, that's the thing.
So, how many people successfully have guardianship permanently?
But it doesn't always work.
How many people are successful in having guardianship permanently?
Listen, here's a problem with all this when we talk about it, Lionel.
Nobody keeps track of guardianship.
There's no entity in the federal government.
We keep track of missing cars.
And missing kids and missing boats.
But we don't keep track of people in America who've been judged so vulnerable that we've taken all their civil rights.
So just my research over many, many years, I will tell you it is extremely difficult to get out of guardianship once it has been established.
If your family fights for you, they're considered by the guardian who wants all the control.
To be troublemakers and dysfunctional, and they can go to the judge and say, Your Honor, I want permission to ban them from seeing the ward because they really upset the person.
And the judges just say, okay, oh, there's a petition for guardianship?
Okay.
These cases, Lionel, are held in equity courts.
They could be called probate courts, surrogate courts, you know, all sorts of different courts, but they go by equity court rules.
There's no due process.
Well, it's not like civil or criminal.
Exactly.
And what the equity also means, no jury trials, no trials, no nothing.
This is a whole other world.
Let me ask you a question.
Diane, what do you think are the percentages of guardianships for street urchins and demented homeless people with no assets?
And what happens?
What happens when the monies that are there for the Guardian to make fees off of somehow is dissipated, either through Guardian fees or whatever?
What happens to the Guardian?
Does it continue on?
Can they be forced to be the Guardian?
Does the judge ever say, oh, no, buddy, you want to be the Guardian?
You're the Guardian.
I'm sorry, we are...
Let me see just a second here.
If we really cared about helping the most vulnerable, we would not have so many people living on the streets in California and New York and Detroit and Dallas.
You know, my research shows that with money.
Now, does that surprise anybody?
This is an ill-regulated, unsupervised system where guardians don't even have to be licensed.
Many states don't do background checks on guardians.
You just have to be 18 years old, maybe a high school graduate.
You know, it's like, what?
These people are taking over another person's life, and they're not even licensed to operate?
So, I mean, listen, let me give you some figures.
I know figures usually make people's eyes glaze over, but look.
No, no.
Not here.
You become a ward.
You become a ward of the court.
Lose your civil rights.
They take all your assets.
This is a states-run program.
State courts in this country confiscate conservatively $50 billion in wards of states every single year.
So over the years, we figure there's a pot of money.
The average guardianship lasts about six years.
$300 billion is sitting there.
Ready to be administered by people who did not earn that money, do not own that money, but the court has given it to them.
So is it any wonder that the criminal element, the unscrupulous among us, have flocked to work in this system?
They don't have to be licensed or certified or really be qualified in any way.
There were felons, I found, who had been named as guardians.
My wife and I were watching with horror this Wendy Williams documentary.
You know a little bit about that.
A little involvement tangentially.
Explain, please.
Well, Wendy Williams was a really sad example.
And if you watch the documentary, you see that she clearly needs help.
Britney Spears, cutting off her hair for the paparazzi, clearly needed help.
But what do we do with people like that in our society?
Do we just take away all their rights and isolate them away from their family and over-medicate them?
I found so many cases of guardians that just told the caretakers that they hired, just give them some Valium or Haldol or, you know, just over-medicate them to make them compliant.
So, Wendy Williams, how did it happen?
Who brought the petition?
Unbelievably, it was her financial advisor at Wells Fargo Bank.
Now, in the book, I have another case of a Wells Fargo financial advisor, this one in California, Wendy's in New York, filing a petition for guardianship.
What's up with Wells Fargo?
Who are you to get involved in one of your clients' personal mental health life?
But that's what started for Wendy.
I've spoken at length and emailed at length with her sister, Wanda, who lives in Florida, and that family is beside themselves because they don't know where she is.
She's being helped?
Do you say she's being helped?
Well, where?
How?
What's going on?
There's a similar thing I've noticed, for example, two years ago, we had these different names in different states of Florida.
They called it the Baker Act.
There's a provision that says if you are a threat to yourself or others, you can be held for 24 hours up to 72 without a hearing.
And all it takes is for me to say, you know what, Diane Diamond said some things to me.
And the next thing you know, there you are at the height of your career.
And I'm unscrupulous.
And I hate you.
And I'm your rival.
And you're looking at Emmys and Pulitzers.
And right before that, all of a sudden there's a knock at your door.
You're almost like swatted in a weird way.
And you were taken away for observation.
You say, oh, you're let go.
But yet, that remains forever.
And by the way, these records, like sexual...
I know nobody wants to talk about it, but sexual abuse registries and the like, those aren't like credit reports or criminal findings that you can have expunged.
Those are merely administrative records.
So for the rest of your life...
And you try getting life insurance or something and you, excuse me, what is this we're seeing here?
You were confined.
Well, they claimed I was a threat.
Did you commit suicide?
Did you threaten suicide?
No.
And people don't realize this until it happens.
But it's because why?
We're just here to help.
I'm not the bad guy.
I'm not the police.
This is the part that kills me.
But you mentioned, remember Britney Spears, Wendy Williams, Heather Locklear.
Look, Marilyn Manson can shave his head and put different contact lenses in.
He's okay.
Ozzy Osbourne.
I don't even know what he's saying.
And Robert Downey Jr. can get drunk and go sleep in the bed of the kid next door.
Nobody guardianized him.
Right.
If Wendy Williams is guardianized because Wendy Williams has a drinking problem, well, what did Robert Downey Jr. have?
I mean, I think he's all sober now, but, you know, it is inadequately applied.
And here's the kicker.
Your ex-lover, your angry business partner, your total stranger, anybody can go and file a petition and you don't even know that there's a legal procedure happening.
Judge never sets eyes on the potential ward.
They never talk to the family.
The judge just rubber stamps it and guardianship's in effect.
Because you're crazy.
Now, let's talk about this one.
In New York, in particular, do you have any particular, without naming names, any particular information?
This is a direct examination.
Ms. Nyman, do you have any particular information as to a case that you're aware of where, let's say, a woman or an individual who, let's say, lived in a rent-controlled apartment for a number of years actually might have been the victim of some kind of unscrupulous and unfairly targeted guardianship?
Oh, I just thank you for asking about that case.
Her name is Paulette Kohler.
She's in her 90s, very spry, very...
Mentally aware and an interesting conversationalist.
She's lived in her rent-controlled, rent-subsidized apartment for more than 50 years.
Her husband's dead.
Her only child is dead.
But she has a really dear friend named Inga.
And Inga Everud is named as her power of attorney.
Well, Paulette Kohler, 90-something, goes to the hospital for a little procedure and wakes up in guardianship.
What?
Here's what happened.
The landlord rent-controlled apartment...
Now explain to the people from elsewhere.
That's a term of art in New York.
That's like gold.
She probably has been paying $200 of rent since the 40s.
You are rent-controlled, rent-subsidized.
You are locked in, and landlords cannot wait for you to leave so that they can take an apartment that was going for maybe $300 a month.
And charge, you know, $20,000, depending upon what it is.
So they will do everything and anything to get you out of there.
So that it frees up this valuable property.
And her apartment, in legal documents filed with the state Supreme Court here, her apartment is now worth millions.
So she wakes up, she's in guardianship, and it's clear that her landlord wants her apartment so they can flip it.
Right.
So they put her in guardianship.
They lock her out of her apartment.
Inga Everud, her best friend in the whole wide world, only friend really, and her power of attorney, is accused in the petition of being under FBI investigation for elder abuse and theft.
It has been a long drawn out couple of years for poor Paulette.
She's been out of her apartment.
Turns out there was never an FBI investigation.
And why a federal agency is investigating elder abuse is unless it's international, global...
They're a little bit...
Yeah, yeah, right.
Yeah, they're not looking at Inga Aberrood.
And it turns out an attorney was hired for Paulette by some friends of hers, and he hired some private investigators, and they were retired FBI guys.
And they discovered there was never an FBI investigation.
So now the guardianship rare case has been terminated.
Paulette is back in her apartment.
And there's a lawsuit filed now against the landlord, the board, several members of the board of the apartment, the attorney who wrote that petition, the guardian, who, by the way, Paulette had $850,000.
That was her nest egg.
In 19 months, he spent, the Guardian spent almost all of it.
In 19 months.
Wow.
Where did it go?
Well, they're supposed to file an audit with the court, so the lawsuit, people who bought the lawsuit are waiting for this audit.
Where did all the money go?
Prove it.
Where did it go?
What about the, even the, are you saying the doorman might have been implicated somehow?
Yeah, he's named in the suit too.
Yes, and one of the nursing homes where they kept...
Paulette.
And Paulette, there's a wonderful video of Paulette walking up and down the hallway saying, get me out of here.
Why am I here?
I want to go home.
Where's my money?
Where are my clothes?
The poor woman went home in the dead of winter.
And she's under guardianship.
The guardian is supposed to protect her.
She went home.
The heat wasn't on.
There was no food in the apartment, in the refrigerator.
And someone had removed her bed.
Where's her guardian spending $850,000 to take care of her?
So these are the, you know, I did not write about the guardianships that go right.
And there are many of them.
And guardianship is a good idea when it's done right.
I wrote about the nationwide problem I found in case after case after case.
And I write in detail about many of them in this book.
The guardianship system does not work.
It doesn't work because of money.
Tell me, Diane Diamond, that there is a movement, a national movement, a tsunami of legislation and people, advocates, who are bringing...
Tell me that you're not the only voice in this...
I mean, tell me that...
Because let me give you a little side note here.
At a recent group, I asked a group of folks who were upset or questioning how in New York, and this is not political, but how...
President Trump could be brought up in this Letitia James thing, and I ask the question, why isn't anybody working on reversing the law that allowed this to happen in the first place?
So, in similar vein, is anybody interested in protecting, fixing, providing more of a confrontation, to allow the Sixth Amendment and the Confrontation Clause, and to have more of an adversarial position between?
You make a plea, you know, the person has a guardian appointed to fight the guardian, almost like a public defender.
Tell me somebody is doing something to fix this.
Please.
Well, in states across the country, there's all these little reform laws happening because there is a groundswell of grassroots people in pockets all across the United States fighting this.
Tooth and nail, making lawmakers come up with reform laws.
First of all, they're kind of like Band-Aids.
And second, most of them don't pass.
So the bills that they're passing are like, the judge should allow visitation of the family.
The judge should highly recommend the guardian file an annual audit.
But it's all should, could, maybe, you know, maybe.
So the problem, you know, a wise man, okay, my husband, once said to me, if there's a bunch of stuff wrong with something, there's really only one thing wrong.
And the one thing wrong with guardianship is there's too many of them.
They're just ladled out like soup at a soup kitchen.
You know, oh, you want a guardianship?
Okay.
You want a conservatorship?
Yep, you got it.
The judges in these cases are, to my mind, the crux of why there is a problem.
Because they just rubber stamp these petitions without vetting the information, without laying eyes on the potential ward.
So there's no legislation ever been...
Recommended or suggested that would change this system on the inside.
Right.
At the beginning of it.
Only after it's already established.
And, you know, their Band-Aid solution.
It's like putting a Band-Aid on a big open, oozing, bleeding wound.
You know what I also found out from years in the court as a prosecutor and defense, the actual criminal stuff didn't really...
That didn't keep me up at night.
Family law, termination of parental rights, guardianship, dependency, having the courts come in and remove a child from...
It's like the opposite of adoption.
And what happens is, what the courts do is...
They will say, well, we have many, many safeguards of procedures.
You have procedures, but nothing's done.
Like, for example, well, if you think that there's a problem with this guardianship, you can file a motion as a friend of the guard, but nothing's done.
Well, but you file something.
So procedural due process is great.
You can file motions.
But the idea is that there's this idea of, look, I'm here.
This is a system that predates me as a judge.
And again, I'm running for re-election.
I can see Judge Diane Diamond cancels a guardianship and a woman runs out in the middle of the street and is hit by a car and we've got to do something to straight.
Who are these judges?
And it's all my fault.
Are there any, just like in the cases of Child Protective Services, is there any agency that works in tandem with the guardians?
Like state, division of elder, whatever it is.
Is there any administrative safeguard or is it just the guardian versus the ward?
Well, you know, a lot of people think it's only elderly people that are conscripted into this and that's not true.
It's young people who've inherited money or people who have a workman's compensation settlement, medical malpractice settlement.
So it could be anybody.
Are there agencies that work with the guardianship court?
Not really after the guardianship has been established.
Adult Protective Services will be called...
Here's an example.
A woman in Tennessee worked hard in her 40s, bought a condo, had a nice car, fell down the steps of her condo, went into a coma.
Adult Protective Services comes, says, oh my gosh, puts her into guardianship.
When she wakes up...
And she fully recovers.
She's in guardianship.
She's put into a group home where you talk about indentured servitude.
She's put to work doing all the grocery shopping, doing all the cooking, keeping track of all of the meds for all the other residents on a computer program.
Now, this is an incapacitated person.
Yeah, right, right, right.
She fought for many years to get out.
The judge completely refused.
The Guardian said, no, no, she needs to stay in.
She finally got out.
Another rare case.
And she sued the state and won.
But look at the years she lost.
The years of her life.
And her condo, her car, everything had been sold by the Guardian to pay for her care.
Let me say this again.
The book is called We're Here to Help.
I'm holding it up right now.
And this is...
I know when you first hear this, you think...
You think I'm crazy.
Now, I was thinking as a devious, evil legal mind, wouldn't it be interesting if somebody said, I got an idea.
Let's have a thing where we're not going to dissolve the guardianship, but we're going to move on behalf of the ward and declare bankruptcy.
What would happen if all of a sudden you had to go to a bankruptcy trustee and say, now we're in federal court.
So that the unscrupulous reviews of the Guardian, in order to maintain their continuous support, have to be viewed.
I mean, that's something that I always think, let's get more people, because, for example, I use the example of squatters.
All of a sudden, all of a sudden, squatting is in the internet.
Now, what's the difference between being a squatter and a burglar?
I have no idea.
Next time, if the police come in and they say, no, no, I'm squatting.
So, things will happen.
I want to say something also, that the people who are the forgotten, the cast-offs, mentally ill, we love, we hate these people.
Look at you.
He's crazy.
She's crazy.
God forbid you have a stroke.
God forbid you have anything where perhaps maybe you look a little different.
But you're just, first of all, again, to be at the point where you cannot take care of yourself when you are so demented, so out of commission that you literally and actually can't bathe.
That's what I think we're talking about.
But isn't it true, Diane, that there's a demonization of people who aren't normal?
That people who don't like the way they look or the way they act, a little funny.
Mm-hmm.
There's a young girl from a wealthy family in Virginia who had some psychiatric issues, some psychological issues, and she was put into guardianship.
She's in college.
She's making really good grades, but she's in guardianship.
And she wrote that, you know, there are other people with my issues.
I think she had bipolar.
I think she was bipolar.
A very touching thing that I found online that said, there are lots of people with the same thing that I have.
And they're out living their life, but I'm under guardianship.
And I'm fine now because my medication is stable.
I'm in college.
I'm making good grades.
Why am I still in guardianship?
Well, the answer is because the judge won't change it.
The judge hears from the guardian, you know, is this guardianship still necessary?
And the guardian says, of course.
Right.
What's a guardian going to say?
No, take away my $600 gig.
You know, they're not going to say that.
So it's a vicious cycle.
Once a family finds a loved one in guardianship, they're almost powerless to do anything.
They can fight and fight and fight and fight, but they spend a lot of money doing that.
And their guardian, who they're fighting, Can hire a lawyer.
Yes.
And guess who pays for that?
The ward.
The ward.
Now, the guardian can hire a maid, a cook, a driver, a personal messenger, a dog walker, a pooper scooper for the dog.
You know, all of these people are paid for out of the ward's estate.
And get this, this is the thing that drives me the craziest, and as an attorney, probably you too.
When all the liquid money runs out, The checking account money, the savings account money, it's all gone.
The guardian goes back to the judge and says, Your Honor, I'm out of money.
I've got to sell their home.
And I've got to sell their car and their whole collection of coins.
And I need money for these people.
And, you know, she's so bad off, I've got to put her in a home.
So I need money.
And the judge says, well, wait a minute.
Isn't the home bequeathed in the will?
Her daughter?
Well, yeah, but I really need to sell the home.
And the judge says, okay, let's bust the will.
Let's bust the trust.
Let's bust the irrevocable trust.
You can go into it.
Forget whoever they designated as their power of attorney.
You're the power of attorney, Mr. Guardian.
Subvert the testamentary disposition, the intent.
It's almost like a virus that short-circuits this.
By the way, while we're on this subject, and just remember, I know people say, do you have a health proxy?
Do you have a power of attorney?
That's a good idea.
You know you want to have a health proxy?
Okay, good, good.
I think that makes sense because I know cases where somebody is just, the hospital stay has been too long and they've got, you know, checking and bills, whatever.
That's great.
Oh, the hospital can guardianize you too.
Many hospitals do that.
But before you do this for friends, for this thing called power of attorney, make sure you realize, and also, if you can, to trigger when it is undone, to find out not to give something which is basically, inadvertently, this limitless, endless, interminable power over your life, which is something people should think about.
Well, again, this is one of those things which, it's a private, Form of tyranny.
It's the government enforcing what amounts to robbery, theft, larceny.
Not to say that, listen, we've got to get this out of the way.
There have been many great guardians.
And there have been people who said, I couldn't have lived without my guardian.
Thank God this woman would be great.
Thank you.
Now that we got that out of the way, we're not talking about this.
We're talking about the fact that courts and legislatures have to do something to be more scrupulous in preventing this from happening, especially when great people like you document horror after horror.
And when you watch this Wendy Williams, if I didn't know better, I was wondering, who is allowing this absolute...
Please.
I think you have an answer.
You in the back?
Yes.
Who is committing this?
Yeah.
She was really, if you watch that two-part documentary, it's on Lifetime.
She's self-destructing.
And realize, as you watch that documentary, Wendy Williams is under guardianship.
And for more than a year, a year and a half, her guardian has frozen her money.
Refused to pay for her only child's college education and his rent down in Miami where he's going to school.
And she's letting Wendy Williams drink herself to death.
Well, the guardianship system is supposed to protect vulnerable people.
Wendy Williams is out on the town in Manhattan, drunk as a skunk, falling asleep in gay bars, shopping in a store and falling asleep on the floor.
Where's her guardian?
Her guardian, I don't know what she's being paid.
I know who she is, and I'm not going to name her, but she is sort of notorious.
She's attached to many, many controversial cases that I investigated.
Where was she to try to stop Wendy Williams from literally killing herself?
Well, one would think, though, but I'm saying who in the family...
Why would anybody?
I think Wendy agreed to this.
I thought maybe.
First of all, I always find it interesting how somebody who was incapacitated could theoretically agree.
Agree to anything.
It's just like the old joke in DUI cases.
When people were drunk, too drunk to drive, and they would leave their car on the side of the road by signing a waiver with the police department.
And of course, on cross-examination, the police officer would say, but you realize a waiver signed by a drunk person is invalid.
So he's not drunk enough.
Anyway, so here's Wendy Williams.
She's crazy, but apparently somebody, Lifetime or whatever, signed off on this.
But does this display of craziness and this exhibition of her decline, does it benefit continued guardianship?
Does it benefit her in a weird way?
Or...
Does it benefit the family members?
Who are these people who allow this even to take place?
Especially those who move in.
All of a sudden, they're so concerned over their aunt or aunt and their sister.
It's like a Gordian knot of parties.
Meanwhile, you see this Wendy Williams and we love to stare and gawk with her grave disease and his proptosis and her eyes.
Bulging out of her head and drinking.
It's horrible.
Wendy Williams will never recover from this.
She'll never be resuscitated.
Well, she may never, ever get out of guardianship either.
So there's a lot of things in your question.
Her family, specifically her sister Wanda and her son, Kevin Jr., tried and tried and tried and tried to get her not to drink.
They're in Florida.
Well, Wendy Williams is famous.
She's got, you know, tens of millions of dollars and she's going to do what she wants and don't tell me what to do.
We all have that person in our family, you know, who it's like, oh, they're self-destructing and we can't do anything about it.
So I don't blame the family.
But once the Guardian took over, there were all these allegations that her son was stealing money from her.
He's in Florida.
What are you talking about?
I think this all started because Wendy Williams wanted to give her son a birthday party.
And traditionally, the woman has lots and lots of money.
She spends $100,000 on a birthday party for her son.
It's her money.
She can do what she wants.
But this year, or last year, that just tweaked her Wells Fargo financial advisor into action.
And so now there's a guardianship.
And will Wendy Williams ever get out of it?
Look.
She's finally in some sort of facility.
She can call her sister Wanda, but she can't say where she is.
And Wanda seems to think that she's getting better.
But get this, Lionel.
Right before the documentary is coming out, the two-part documentary, the care team of Wendy Williams issues a press release which reveals that she has dementia and aphasia, which is the inability to speak.
Who the hell are they to give out private, federally protected HIPAA medical information?
And they said in the press release, Wendy Williams has approved this.
She's incapacitated.
That's what I'm saying, right.
Catch-22, right.
She's okay to approve of this.
It's like the Guardian or the Care Team, whatever that is, is that medical people?
They should have known better.
Wanted to CYA.
I got a cover there, you know what, because of all the revelations that were going to come out in the documentary.
They let her go for a year and a half drinking herself silly before they finally acted and put her in a facility to help her.
Diane Diamond, let me ask you this question.
This is important.
Here's the book.
Of course, we're here to help.
Thank you.
When guardianship goes wrong.
Oh, no, no, we're going to have this, by the way.
Links below and clickable links and I know how to do this.
Assume that I am the king of the world and I appoint you to fix this.
And let's use Wendy Williams as an example.
What could we do to both address her claims, validate and weigh the bona fides of the individuals involved, and allow her to extricate herself when she is, quote, better or able to be among the living?
What would you suggest?
Well, first of all, again, it's a state-run program, so there are 50 different answers to that.
But the bottom line is there's no federal laws about this, and I think there needs to be some federal laws.
Something uniform.
Something uniform.
You know, the family must be involved.
And if you can't find the family, go find the family and talk.
There's got to be a hearing, a trial, something where the judge actually lays eyes on the potential ward.
And talks to them and gets some medical feedback.
Right now, a medical person who may meet with, say, Wendy Williams for half an hour, oh, yep, incapacitated.
No, no.
There needs to be more than one person and qualified people, neuropsychologists, geriatric people if it's an older person, psychiatrists if it's a younger person with psychological problems.
So there's lots of things the federal government can do.
But you know what?
I tell the history in this book of guardianship.
It goes back to when the federal government guardianized the entire Osage Indian tribe in the early 1900s because they had too much money.
They weren't spending their money, right?
They were incapacitated.
That's another story.
Watch Killer of the Flower Moon.
You'll figure that out.
But they have held hearings since the mid...
The 70s.
And they have heart-rending story after heart-rending story, and they know the federal government knows what needs to be enacted as legislation.
They know the Department of Justice needs to move in.
These are civil rights violations, but the DOJ won't do it.
One thing I've noticed, by analogy, that I would suggest...
Whenever there was a case involving termination of parental rights or dependencies, the court would appoint a guardian ad litem, a guardian for the purposes of litigation.
Now think about this.
Here you would have the ward, the person who was having the guardianship or conservatorship directed towards him or her, has the guardian representing them.
But what we really need...
It's a guardian ad litem.
They have those.
But the guardian ad litem would be perhaps at odds against the guardian when the guardian ad litem would say, I don't think this person is necessarily incapacitated as much as the guardian does.
Now, remember, they've got the best interests of the client, both of them theoretically involved.
So then you'd have to have a litigation and a fight.
But here's the thing.
And this is the question, I guess, is the most important.
What is the burden of proof?
What is the standard?
Must I prove Diane Diamond is incapacitated or in need of a guardianship?
Based on the preponderance of the evidence, reasonable doubt.
I mean, how much...
Is it just my blanket assertion?
It's that document.
It's that petition for guardianship and whatever is in it.
95% of the time, I'm not exaggerating.
The judges just say, oh, wow.
Oh, she forgets to pay her bills.
Oh, her son comes and takes her car and her checkbook.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, incapacitated.
I'm going to tell you, in most of these cases, and again, the titles vary state to state, but you're a ward of the court.
You're a judge really dead in the eyes of the law.
You get a guardian to take over all of your stuff, but you also are assigned a guardian ad litem, a lawyer, to act how?
You see, there's this big point of contention.
Are they there to be, as a California conservatorship judge said, to be the court's eyes and ears on this case?
Or are they there?
To represent the best interest of their client.
Right.
That's my point.
Yes.
Well, yeah.
If it's the latter, how can you know the best interest of a client if they're incapacitated?
You know, so again, it's this catch-22.
It's a judicial catch-22 where the targeted person never wins.
They never win.
And it fills the pockets of people within the system.
Guardians, guardian ad litems, what they call court visitors, medical evaluators.
There's this whole cadre of people.
And I'm telling you, Lionel, the guardian ad litem is never going to say, oh, I disagree with the guardian.
Because then they would lose their place in this very lucrative system.
Exactly.
Now, another thing, too, is let's make it even more complicated.
Amanda Bynes, this very once talented, now she's on social media.
I could see somebody saying, going through Instagram and saying, you know who this is?
This person happens to be, this person happens to be a very rich, the daughter of a very, and she right now is claiming to have no pronouns and identifies with being a cat.
Or whatever it is.
Now, let's assume somebody takes this, and what you thought was great kind of Instagram, libs of TikTok kind of funny, all of a sudden is used against you.
So my warning, my admonition is, be careful out there, because what you might consider to be quirky and weird and goofy behavior...
Used against you.
Exactly.
And you say, ladies, your honor...
I have this, I'd like to enter into evidence, here's Diane Diamond, who has basically, she believes she's a wallaby, and now, is this, this goes back to my initial question, is this kind of like the Overton window, the allowable acceptance of creative, you know, a little lunacy, a little crazy, a little wacky, I mean...
If you've ever heard Truman Capote, go back and watch any old Merv Griffin.
Go back.
Erwin Corey, I know it was an act.
The point is, we used to enjoy this kind of quirky, marvelous...
Gilbert Gottfried was another one.
Yes, right.
But this is also the demonization of mental illness.
And also, as more and more kids and people are identifying with mental illness, panic disorders, Animal, you know, rehabilitation ferrets and these, you know, these animals they have to have for their own well-being and CBDs and all of this stuff.
The number of suicide, they say suicide attempts on the part of young people going through the roof.
We have a whole bevy, this new fertile ground of potential wards.
So be careful out there, folks.
If you're putting this out, You get a hold of somebody who thinks, you know what, I think I'm, and by the by, let's assume that I see a famous person.
Let's say I don't know Amanda Bynes.
I'm here in New York and she's wherever.
Could I not go and say, that could be my thing.
I'm just scouring, looking for new potential.
Victim, so to speak.
The victim pool over the years, the eight years that I've been doing this, it used to just be the elderly because they're the people mostly with money.
They saved all their life, scrimped and saved.
But over the time, the victim pool has grown 12-fold.
And let me tell you this.
When you have a person in your family who there's a problem, what do you do?
You go to a lawyer.
People frequently turn to an elder law lawyer, an estate lawyer, a civil rights lawyer, whatever.
When you go to a lawyer, and I spell out cases in the book, people went to a lawyer simply to say, you know, my brother was my POA, my power of attorney, but he's dead now, so I want to make a new will, and here's my situation.
And that attorney will get as much information from you as they possibly can.
And that attorney can go with a petition to the court and guardianize you.
You haven't even signed a paper engaging that lawyer.
I found a case in Rhode Island.
I found a case in New Mexico.
Many cases of lawyers, one in Florida, Gainesville, where lawyers just said, ooh, boy, there's a million-dollar estate here, and that woman's kind of kooky.
Or that daughter's kooky.
If that is not a conflict of interest, but see, here's the thing.
Give an example.
In the old days, in juvenile law, I used to do a routine.
It was almost like George Carlin's baseball.
In football, but in baseball, in criminal court, it's the United States versus Diane Diamond.
Or the state of New York versus the people of the United States versus Diane Diamond.
But in juvenile, it's in a way.
The matter of, Diane Diamond, a child.
It's a very, very...
And when you're arrested as a child, you don't have a right to bail because it's not considered incarceration.
It's therapy.
It's rehabilitation.
It's like, what?
So, the law loves to say, well, this is criminal, but this is civil.
This is puritanical.
And we're here to help you.
Yes, we're here to help.
Well, listen, Diane Diamond, the book is...
We are going to be coming up at the 3 West Club.
We're going to be doing this.
We're going to be taking this on the road.
I'm telling you, people, when they hear this, they'll say, oh, okay.
No.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Really educate yourself.
This is like tyranny at the private, corporate, unscrupulous level.
Diane Diamond.
By the way, everybody knows, yeah!
You're one of those people that, yeah!
Because you have been with, you have been, I'll have your CV, so to speak, but you have been doing this.
Again, not forever, but you have made your bones, young lady.
Well, I don't like bullies, you know?
I don't like people that take advantage of others.
And that's been sort of the hallmark in my crime and justice career.
So this is the latest.
Exactly.
Well, Diane Diamond, the book is We're Here to Help When Guardianship Goes Wrong.
I will have all of the links.
Thank you so much.
And I think we're going to chat again.
And you have been incredible.
So everybody, if you're watching this, go on and buy.
By the way, this is just, this is one of those ones where you'll read this and you'll say.
And by the way, this should be entitled, I had no idea.
I had no...
It's like squatting.
All of a sudden, can you do that?
How many times can you do that?
Oh yeah, they do it.
The second thing is, can you do that?
Yes, you can do that.
The pool of guardianship awards is growing every year by 200,000, 220,000, 50,000 a year.
So, you know, if you think this can't happen to you or someone you love...
Think again.
Read the book.
I also have tips on how to protect yourself.
Indeed.
Diane Diamond, thank you, my friend.
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