AARP Foundation Wins $54 Million Verdict in Pension Case

A jury has awarded $54.2 million to former employees of a New York Catholic hospital who were denied their pension benefits. It’s the culmination of a legal battle that AARP Foundation helped launch more than six years ago. 

On December 12, jurors in the New York state civil trial ruled in favor of 1,124 former employees of St. Clare’s Hospital. The plaintiffs in Hartshorne v. Catholic Diocese of Albany had alleged that the diocese and several other defendants had mismanaged their pension funds, denying them retirement income they had long counted on.

“Today, justice caught up with the facts,” Louis Lopez, vice president of litigation at AARP Foundation, said on the day of the ruling. “The jury confirmed what the evidence showed: The diocese and the individual defendants, including the bishops who controlled the boards of directors, betrayed the trust of more than 1,100 St. Clare’s Hospital employees.”

Former employees of St. Clare’s—a Catholic hospital that closed and whose assets were transferred to a much larger hospital in 2008—had been told for years that their pension plan was in good financial shape. In 2018, however, the corporation overseeing the plan announced that it was terminating the plan, which meant that the plan would no longer pay pension benefits. Some retirees who were already collecting their pensions would have their benefits cut by 30 percent, some would stop receiving their benefits and still others would end up getting no benefits at all. 

Mary Hartshorne, the lead plaintiff in the case, worked for 28 years at St. Clare’s, forgoing raises, she said, when she and others were told that raises for them might mean layoffs for someone else.

“We were told, ‘Don’t worry, because we have that pension for you. That’s guaranteed,’ ” Hartshorne said in an interview in 2023.  

She retired from St. Clare’s in 2005 with a pension of $864 a month. But when her pension was cut, Hartshorne, then 69, was forced to sell her lakeside home. “My pension paid my mortgage,” she said. “I had a little house on a little lake. It was peaceful and beautiful, and I loved it. But I’m not the only one. Many, many people have had broken hearts and broken plans. It’s just devastating.”  

AARP Foundation fights to protect retirees

In 2019, AARP filed a suit on behalf of St. Clare’s retirees in New York state court along with Legal Services of Northeastern New York, Brooklyn Legal Services and David Pratt, a professor at Albany Law School. That case was merged with a separate suit that New York State Attorney General Letitia James filed in 2022.