You all are missing the two key features
- She is female
- She is worth alot of money and can generate more
I got nothing smart to say about this kind of thing as it’s way outside of what I practice. I usually turf this shit to psych and forget it.
It’s this doctor:
Wouldn’t geriatric psychiatry be an especially suitable subspecialty for assessing dementia? IOW it doesn’t seem like they merely plucked someone to operate outside of his domain?
His 1992 paper “Assessing Competency to Make a Will” appearing in Am J Psychiatry provides a correspondence address resolving to UCLA School of Medicine. It also contains an Easter egg:
From the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, and the law firm of Loeb and Loeb, Los Angeles. Address reprint requests to Dr. Spar, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA School of Medicine, 760 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90024.
I’m not alleging any impropriety here whatsoever since there are both medical and legal components to capacity for entering contracts, and you presumably want the (perhaps limited number of) experts from these specific domains, but holy shit if that isn’t an unfortunate pairing in retrospect.
I don’t think we’re missing these points. We honed in on them very early in the thread. I’m asking someone to humor me on the idea that she’s a high-functioning, gravely ill person hiding a degenerative neurocognitive disorder since age 27 while acting as a multi-platinum artist with successful world tours and residencies because it’s laughable. That is exactly the claim and very narrow legal argument (afaict) her “team” is doubling down on according to Ronan Farrow who is never wrong.
I’m on mobile so this is brief, but if I’m playing the sociopathic money-stealer then I’m initially trying via a psychiatric diagnosis with suicidal/homicidal risk. But if for some reason I have to go the dementia route then I’m slamming behavior variant frontotemporal dementia. Initial symptoms often show up as personality changes, inhibitory/behavioral issues, and emotional liability - with relatively far less (and later-developing) memory impairment than other more well-known neurocognitive disorders.
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FTD is the most common form of dementia <60, with occasional cases in the 20s.
It’s also pretty deadly after a few years, though. So long-term mileage of a fake diagnosis may vary. It would actually be easier to just say she has a neurocognitive disorder and then diffuse when people ask for something more specific, but FTD is the most realistic of specific diagnoses (without TBI) that I can think of - mostly because of her age and because FTD is biased toward emotional/behavioral issues rather than memory impairment.
I am not a dementia specialist, but have seen FTD directly in a ~30-year-old and with suspected onset prior.
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Yeah. I’m not saying she has it. They are stealing her money.
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Apologies. I was only trying to be funny.
Not in any way shape or form to make a serious point that anyone itt does not understand the underlying misogyny and greed at the heart of this matter.
I shall endeavor to make my joke more obvious next time.
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I think the key to this game is to get a demented psychologist/psychiatrist who still happens to be licensed and get them to do the evaluation.
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I have no evidence or reason to believe that this guy is acting in bad faith, but I’ll point out he sure does seem to magically appear when the money is huge. Maybe it’s just a location thing because it looks like he’s a rather prominent capacity determiner in Los Angeles County performing some high-profile incapacitations, including this one where I’m not entirely sure who is grifting who:
Recall that Sterling was forced to sell the team to Steve Ballmer by a California probate court after being declared incapacitated by two doctors hired by Sterling’s estranged wife in her attempt to wrestle control of the trust. You could hear Jerry West’s silhouette audibly exhale. CBS News reported this:
HOWEVER:
LOLOLOL
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Also from that filing:
Streisand is the same guy Britney tried to hire before the court determined she did not have the capacity, but notice Loeb appears again, this time acting in the interest of Ballmer who benefitted from Spar’s capacity declaration. And yet another statement from a different attorney for the lolz:
Legal medical experts are complete fucking clowns and 100% hired guns. I follow a lot of EM medmal cases and there’s always some fuckass willing to say nonsense to get paid. Hell, the guy who wrote one of the main textbooks for EM was censured for pushing nonsense in a medmal case.
It’s not just medmal. If you’re willing to pay, you can find an expert (i.e., someone who at least has the credentials to pass as such) who is willing to say just about anything. They know it’s bullshit. The other experts know it’s bullshit. But maybe the jury will eat it up.
Cummings is a mega prolific Alzheimer’s researcher, right? He’s probably not trolling the probate courts with capacity declarations?
What’s stopped the agency that was set to assume conservatorship from taking over?
An EV calculation on PR? Someone upthread posted that they had a strong reputation.
If his testimony in this case is just a one-off thing, then I don’t think you put him in the same category on these professional expert witnesses who are providing expert testimony all the time. For some of them it is most (or even all) of what they do.
I’m not any kind of Dr but I can diagnosis Serling with a serious case of racism. But I doubt that’s enough to declare someone from being incapacitated.
The law—some things are best in an adversarial system. Somethings aren’t but adversarial it is.
Was there an adversarial component to the granting of the conservatorship initially. I feel like if someone with her best interests in mind were actually vigorously fighting it, she’s never in this spot. It seems to me that this whole thing happened because the bad actors removed the adversarial part. I assume the judge has some responsibility to address that kind of stuff, but that never happened either.
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The judge must be like “these fine upstanding lawyers and her Daddy are saying this so it must be true”