when was the first sign for you uh
for just the amount of corruption in on the medical side of things
i i think i always knew it was there but you don't want to deal with it and when you're
caring for a loved one that's sick your priority is to care for that person it's not to worry about
what sinister you know person is lurking around the corner but you know we have to go into
things with open eyes and i think the first sign for me that something was really wrong
was as soon as my mother was released from the hospital and i started to question the decisions
that i was making because in that moment of crisis when my mother obviously you know couldn't live on
her own anymore she had had a fall i was hoping that she might go back to living independently
you know as we all want to think that that's going to what it's going to be and that person's going
to turn the corner i had to face the reality that most likely she was going to need a level of care
beyond what i have been providing before and the social worker at the hospital was very informed
um and very opinionated on what i should do and you trust the professionals and you make
decisions and you think that other people might know more than you do even sometimes when your gut
is telling you that something's seriously wrong and if there's one thing that i've learned over
my entire lifetime that i tell my girls and i tell my friends and i tell everybody that i can
is trust your gut when you know something's wrong it probably is and if i had trusted my
gut at that point i might have made different decisions but i trusted the professionals
and very quickly i started to realize that this is a really integrated system of people that work
together that are all making money and at the end of the day it ends up being more of a business
venture than it is caring about the elderly and we see those connections really clearly
in the present day like an example that everyone can see if you've been paying
attention is like the connection between i don't know big pharma and mainstream media um
you look at who who is who is paying for the air time uh who the big donors are and you start to go
huh might that sway the news in a way so yeah that that was one of the big lessons i had to
learn in the last couple of years it's just it's pretty shocking and and everyone's got
their their hand in the pile a hand in the pot or or so to speak whatever um so
what or the pile it's the pile whatever pile of money there is the pile there's a pile
there's hands in it yeah when was so so it sounds it sounds like you you
took advice maybe from people you shouldn't have so for folks who haven't read your book
you're basically telling the tale of how um you know you you ended up getting charged
for like misappropriate it was correct me if i'm wrong but like misappropriating your mom's like
social security or whatever you're basically like using it to pay for my mother's fines it's yeah
yeah when i shouldn't have because she was in a guardianship the whole thing was really twisted
but you don't realize really the moral of the story is number one if you have a parent or a
loved one all the pre-planning in the world that you think you have in order you think you have
a power attorney yeah you should still go out and you should do all that but if you know the system
the way that i do you realize that all of those things are disposable when it comes to a court
of law and as much planning as you do if you end up in a contentious situation in my case it was me
fighting against the nursing home that i knew was abusing my mother versus it could be and you know
i don't know if you remember the artist peter max but i know you're up in the tri-state area
and peter max was this really iconic artist in the 70s and 80s like andy warhol who's a pop art
icon he is now being held in guardianship and what happened in his family is very common too
is there'll be a daughter and a son and they can't agree with what to do with that and they start to
fight and pretty shortly they hire attorneys and the attorneys end up you know maybe not acting
in the best interest quite frankly and looking to figure out how to work within the system there and
they'll go ahead and they'll appoint a guardian and that guardian is probably somebody that the
law firm knows that's also again got their hand in the pile as you put it so eloquently earlier
and all of a sudden you're in a situation where your loved one is in guardianship and you no
longer have any say and you no longer have any control and they're they're basically being human
trafficked by a legal system that is in place in this country which strips people of their
you know constitutional rights and makes them wards of the state
so we have this happening and you know it's happening everywhere all over the country
but it's really bad when we have elected judges so anywhere there's elected judges you see this level
of corruption and in 38 states with elected judges we have this problem so in the case of peter max
and libra max you had a family divided and then the legal predators were able to come in
a guardian was appointed and now of course it's a family in crisis and poor peter max at the
end of the day is the one that suffers in this guardianship and although he may have alzheimer's
and it may be advancing and he may not be the same man that he is everybody deserves a level of
dignity and guardianship is something that strips people's dignity and takes their rights away
and probably the the guardianship or conservatorship i mean everybody at this
point has heard of at least free brittany and it for a lot of people it's probably the first
time they've even heard the words guardianship or conservatorship and a lot of people very as you
know we know very passionately some people have been uh the big britney fans have been coming out
you know non-stop talking about free britney but i think very recently there was a development in
her case well yeah i think it was it was basically lifted and you have people who are like oh she's
you know this is all up front she's not really free but i don't know it's i can't get wrapped
up in all that so this is this is from actually very recently this was from just the other day
brittany came out and posted on her instagram a lot of the mainstream outlets have been picking
this up and this is basically her saying okay she's free now thanks thanks everybody for the
help okay so i'm here today to answer all of you guys questions and the first main question
that you guys have been asking me is what am i gonna do now that the conservatorship's over with
very good question well let's see i've been on the conservatorship for 13 years
it's a really long time to be in a situation you don't want to be in
um so i'm just grateful honestly for each day and being able to have um the keys to my car
and being able to be independent and feel like a woman and um owning an atm card seeing cash
for the first time being able to buy candles it's the little things for us women but it makes a huge
difference and um i'm grateful for that you know it's nice it's really nice um but i'm not here
to be a victim um i lived with victims my whole life as a child that's why i got out of my house
and i worked for 20 years and worked my ass off i'm here to be advocate for people
with real disabilities and real illnesses um i'm a very strong woman so i can only imagine
um what the system has done to those people um so hopefully my little story um hopefully my story
will make an impact and um make some changes um in the corrupt system and the free britney movement
you guys rock honestly my voice was muted and threatened for so long and um i wasn't able to
speak up or say anything and um because of you guys in the awareness of kind of knowing what
was going on and delivering that news to the public for so long you gave it awareness um to
all of them and um because of you i honestly think you guys saved my life in a way 100
um and i know there's a lot of jokes about the free brittany movement um
we're not free we're expensive okay birdies i'm expensive too but anyways with that said um let's
see how do you understand that joke we're gonna have a good year good christmas and rock band
does she seem like anxious to you like i'm not trying to pick on britney but like she's the the
video has got to be sped up this one is sped up so it's like that these videos are sped up
i don't know i don't know what are your thoughts on this karen i i don't know i feel like i think
she's like you know my thoughts are you know i think we're all a little off i'm a little off
you know i think she's a little awkward she's a little off but i could be a little awkward a
little off and that doesn't mean that you need to be in a conservatorship and have your rights taken
away and in brittany's case as much as she was a problem child problem young adult probably had a
lot of issues that needed to be addressed probably was at some points not making the right decisions
for herself that certainly doesn't warrant somebody being held in captivity for 13 years and
that's what she's experienced so i would imagine right now it's got to be a really like awkward
time for her she's you know being able to express herself and i've seen some of her posts and went
wow wait you're really going all out there aren't you but you know what after 13 years in captivity
i think a little wild's gonna come out and you know i'm sure she has some issues a lot of us
have issues but that doesn't mean that you get your your rights taken away and stripped of your
dignity and treated like a captive and have your family profiting off of your hard work and having
lawyers profiting off of your hard work and in brittany's case she might be free now which is
great i'm so glad that she can go buy candles because that's exactly what i would want to
do as well i'm so glad how precious this is the first thing she's like i need to go buy a candle
the little things but it is the little things you know freedom isn't free and that's what this
country was founded on is people that appreciated that so god bless brittany for everything that
she's doing to raise the awareness because i'm sure she never thought that she was going to
become the spokesperson for this issue and here we are so i think as much as she's really you know
together when she's on stage it's got to be a little bit awkward to be out there talking about
a subject you never thought you would talk about in a million years yeah also she's been uh so
famous for like most of her life like from a kid and that has that takes a toll you know who knows
emotionally developmentally spiritually you know everything it's it's it's not
easy to just like be famous your whole life and she's under such intense scrutiny and
yeah it is so easy to be like what drugs is she on why is the video sped up and like
that's it's like you know she's probably on some stuff but like she's she's also a money-making
machine you know everybody had her at their hands in her pile and like at one point i read that she
was only getting like her allowance for the year was like 78 grand is what she got and
now she's saying she didn't have an atm card she couldn't like just go buy things that's insane i
it seems horrible it it's pretty crazy but that's the way that it works there's a man named um i
want to say his name oh his name is doug keegan it took me a minute and he's in tampa florida and he
was recently freed from a guardianship this is a man who was in his 40s i believe when it happened
and his family didn't approve of the woman that he was marrying and he'd met a woman from thailand or
somewhere and fell in love with her and you know she came over here and they were you know out
there spending his trust in doing things that the family thought was inappropriate and they stripped
his trust away called him a drug addict put him in a guardianship you know his relationship fell
apart they isolated him and he was living he was living in a hotel he was living in a hotel and
riding a bicycle and i talked to him on the phone and i said to myself when i took him on the phone
this guy sounds smarter than 90 of the people that i work with on a daily basis like this is a
brilliant guy how did this happen to him and yeah did he make some mistakes did he have a little bit
of a drinking issue at some point absolutely no question and he owns that again how do you strip
somebody's rights and take away their freedoms and they're living in a hotel and he was only
allowed to go to certain stores so he could go to the dollar tree he could go to win dixie he had a
restricted like debit card and those were only the places that he could go his entire life taken away
from him this is a guy who was 40 something years old with a job and a trust and he met
this beautiful woman and thought okay i'm going to follow up with her and you know we're going to run
off into the sunset and the family said no way you know how and the system took advantage of him and
placed him in a guardianship and he fought to the now and i am so proud when i see people like this
who take you know they don't take the victim stance you know one of the things britney said was
i grew up in a household of victims and i didn't i don't want to be the victim
doug also did not want to be the victim doug was like how do i get out of this and very quickly
realize there is no way out of guardianship there are very few people that ever get out
but you know what he stood he he stood by his guns he did all of his own legal work he represented
himself pro bono again i told you i talked to him and i was like this guy's brilliant like
this is how do you do how does this happen and this is what is happening every single day in this
country and when my story was unfolding and one of the reasons i really wanted to write the book is
my story was unfolding and i felt ridiculously alone because at that point nobody had heard
about free brittany nobody knew what guardianship was i would try to tell people what was happening
to my mother and they would immediately judge me and look at me like oh you know you must be
doing something wrong oh i charge you with a misdemeanor you must be doing something wrong
and you get into this point like britney said where it's very hard to talk about
it took me a long time before i was able to come to terms with all of it and when i finally did i
was like i need to put this out there i want to tell my story for my mother for what she went
through and for all of the families and all of the people that are in situations that you
don't think it's relatable when you hear somebody else's story and you get to know them intimately
and you know why something happened it makes that person you know more relatable to you but
you also walk away with something and i've always been a really big fan of reading biographies
and reading life stories so that was why the book was so important to me was to go out there
and share the story of what happened to my family and share the story of what happened to my mom and
of course there's a political angle because i've been in politics for a while and that's who i
am so certainly in my case the politics was used against me but at the root of all this i was just
a daughter who was trying to take care of her mom something that most people could relate to
you