Champion for Elder Justice

Had Brooke Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, simply allowed his famous and fabulously wealthy mother to comfortably live out her final days at Holly Hill, her New York country home, he probably could have stolen every last penny from her estate.

“That was [my] goal, to get her back to the country,” says Philip Marshall, Astor’s grandson and Anthony Marshall’s son. “That’s all it really boiled down to. Obviously, it became more complicated than that.”

Instead, Anthony Marshall’s refusal to grant his centenarian mother’s wish to die surrounded by loved ones at her 65-acre Hudson River estate pushed Philip into what became a seven-year odyssey seeking “elder justice” for his grandmother. When Philip Marshall embarked on this mission in 2002, he couldn’t know that his inquiries would snowball, then avalanche, into perhaps the most publicized case of elder abuse of all time.

Since Philip’s role in exposing Astor’s mistreatment became public in July 2006, barely a week passes without a stranger contacting him about elder abuse. Marshall, 56, is a professor of historic preservation, not a lawyer or elder abuse expert. All he has, really, are insights from his own “hard-learned lessons.”

He shared these insights in an interview at his home in South Dartmouth, Mass., several weeks after his father was convicted Oct. 8, at age 85, of stealing from Astor as she suffered from Alzheimer’s disease in the twilight of her life.

DOCUMENT EVERYTHING

Philip Marshall and his grandmother bonded through their shared passion for art and historic preservation. Giving Astor great-grandchildren brought them closer, Philip says. Later, as Astor became more fragile, their attachment deepened. During a visit with her in 2002, Philip first suspected something was amiss. While at Astor’s luxurious Park Avenue duplex, he noticed that her beloved painting Childe Hassam’s “Flags, Fifth Avenue” was missing from her library. Astor, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2000, had agreed to let her son, Anthony, sell the painting after he falsely led her to believe she was going broke, household staffers told Philip. Once the painting was gone, she kept asking, “Can I buy dresses now?”

Philip’s probe started slowly and discreetly. When he visited Astor over the next year, her personal staff opened up to him. Philip learned that his father and his father’s third wife, Charlene, were compromising Astor’s care in ways large and small: authorizing the purchase of discount face cream instead of her favorite brand; locking her dachshunds away because they scratched the furniture; refusing to buy Alzheimer’s medicines.

“I was concerned not only about my grandmother’s compromised lifestyle, but her life,” Philip says.

“It would have taken comparatively little [money] to take care of my grandmother’s needs … much less than a week’s legal fees in Manhattan criminal court.”

Philip kept digging over the next few years. He spent thousands of hours amassing documentation in a ringed binder that grew a couple of inches thick, but he still wasn’t sure what it meant or what he would do with it.