Published on Esquire.com
By Adrienne Westenfeld, February 23rd, 2021
Guardianship scams are ransacking the wealth and autonomy of countless older Americans…
If you love someone in eldercare, Netflix’s “I Care A Lot”, a slick thriller about guardianship fraud, is the stuff of recurring nightmares. “It’s just a story,” you might tell yourself when you jacknife awake in a cold sweat at 3:00 a.m., wrenched from a monstrous dream about Rosamund Pike selling your grandmother’s valuables—but not so fast. While the film isn’t explicitly based on a single true story, it’s constructed from real life events: namely, the myriad guardianship scams ransacking the wealth and autonomy of countless older Americans.
“I Care A Lot” Shows a Very Real Legal System Ripe For Exploitation
The idea first came when I heard news stories about these predatory legal guardians who were exploiting this legal loophole and exploiting the vulnerability in the system to take advantage of older people, basically stripping them of their life and assets to fill their own pockets. These stories were horrifying and not uncommon. So I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole in reading about these various stories happening in various places and thought there was something almost Kafkaesque about somebody knocking on your door and just taking you away for a reason you didn’t think was valid. They had the law on their side and there was nothing you could do.
J Blakeson, Writer and Director, I Care A Lot
