A New York judge has ordered one of the city’s most prominent guardianship companies to return thousands of dollars to an elderly woman for the court-mandated care and oversight it failed to provide her.
Supreme Court Justice Lee Mayersohn wrote in an Aug. 8 decision that the company, New York Guardianship Services, billed Judith Zbiegniewicz monthly but provided “minimal services, if any” for years, including at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
During that time, Zbiegniewicz, who was living under guardianship for depression and anxiety, said she and her husband spent a night on the streets, moved into a city shelter and finally found affordable housing on their own.
Zbiegniewicz and her decade-long journey through the state’s broken guardianship system were the subject of a ProPublica investigation earlier this year. The reporting showed how that system, which is plagued by chronic delays, lax regulation and minimal oversight, has failed to protect thousands of aging and sick New Yorkers who judges have declared incapable of managing their own affairs.
The people most affected are poor wards like Zbiegniewicz who have no friends or family willing to look after them — a group dubbed “the unbefriended” in industry parlance. To care for this group, the city relies on a network of nonprofits. New York Guardianship Services represented itself as one such group and was assigned by the court to be Zbiegniewicz’s guardian.
Despite its representations, NYGS, which serves hundreds of wards, is not actually registered as a nonprofit with state and federal authorities, ProPublica found.
For roughly a decade, the company paid itself from Zbiegniewicz’s bank account, even as she complained about deteriorating living conditions. The problems that she described — living with bedbugs, rats and no heat — persisted for years, and NYGS did little or nothing to fix them while it collected monthly stipends from her limited funds. She said that she eventually tried to reach Mayersohn to flag the neglect and hold NYGS accountable but that her attempts were unsuccessful. The judge’s secretary, she said, simply referred her calls back to the guardianship company.
That changed in June though, after Zbiegniewicz attended a hearing to formally dispute NYGS’ accounting — protests she had previously articulated in a letter to the judge. During a court appearance, she complained to Mayersohn about her time as a ward of NYGS. She said she told him that there was “no excuse for what they put me through.”
Mayersohn’s decision, informed by that hearing, requires the company to return $5,400 to Zbiegniewicz for some of the fees it took between January 2019 and July 2022, a stretch in which she effectively lived on her own outside the guardianship.
The order separately requires the bank that owned the rat-and-bedbug-infested Queens home where NYGS placed Zbiegniewicz to honor a prior housing court settlement, which it has yet to pay. Under the deal, the bank owes Zbiegniewicz $5,000. If it doesn’t pay, she can seek to reclaim the money in court, though Zbiegniewicz said she was skeptical that the effort and cost of doing so would be worth it. An attorney for the bank didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.
In an interview, Zbiegniewicz said that she was pleased with the ruling, but that she was more happy that Mayersohn finally heard directly from her. She also said that she wanted NYGS to be held to account for its actions.
“I got some kind of justice, but the justice would be if they would be taken out of guardianships completely because they do not do anything for the people,” she said.
As part of its reporting, ProPublica identified more than a dozen cases like Zbiegniewicz’s in which NYGS failed to meet the needs of those entrusted to its care. In one case, a woman who’d had two strokes was placed in a nursing home where she was left to sit in soiled diapers, a family member said. In another case, the company continued to collect payments for a man’s care even after he left the country and later died.
Brothers Sam and David Blau, who run NYGS, and a lawyer for the group did not respond to an email seeking comment on the judge’s decision. In response to ProPublica’s previous reporting, Sam Blau, the group’s chief financial officer, said that “we are accountable to the Court” and emphasized that the group’s financial paperwork was scrutinized by examiners who had the power to raise issues. He called the reporting “misguided, without full and proper context, filled with omissions and less than accurate information” but wouldn’t specify what his concerns were when asked. He declined to comment on any specific cases.
Zbiegniewicz credited ProPublica’s investigation for the judge’s action in her case — an uncommon occurrence in New York’s troubled guardianship system. But she also noted it took years of sustained protest on her part, a level of persistence that many ailing and elderly New Yorkers in guardianship cannot manage.
“I’ve done what I could, I feel good about it, the judge heard, you wrote things,” she said. “Maybe somebody will see and maybe somewhere, down the line, somebody will do something about it.”
