How You Can Be 'Legally' Imprisoned for Natural Health Beliefs -
What Every Baby Boomer Should Know
About the U.S. Mental Health System

By Penny Shafer and Jim Moore
All rights reserved
APRIL 2, 2007
© 2007 The Phoenix Foundation

It may be difficult to believe that, after living a happy and productive life as a doctor, a healer, you could be locked away in a mental institute solely because of your beliefs in alternative medicine, even though you have never posed a threat to anyone, including yourself.

This is the true and shocking story of what every Baby Boomer faces in their retirement years, as the medical establishment makes it a crime not to believe in drugs and surgery as the only cure for every ill.

It is a powerful, true-life drama you would think could only happen in the movies or a TV series like CSI or Law and Order. But every word of it is true, backed up with photographs and actual court documents.

It is a painfully personal story, and some would say, "Why air your family's dirty laundry?" but this is an important story to tell, because it is happening to tens of thousands of elderly Americans every year - and they have no one to tell their story for them.

This is a continuation of a web site originally created to bring Penny Shafer's plight to public attention after encountering crooked lawyers and court-appointed conservators. The site published documents very relevant to the case which the lawyer, who it turned out was the conservator's employer and, some say, co-conspirator, did not want the courts to see - at any price.

Under a new lawyer, who was much more aggressive, the site was taken down at her request to give her an opportunity to do what the first lawyer would not. Honoring that request, it was quietly put in the closet.

But because the nightmare continues, even outside the court system, it is being revived in the belief that the public (much of it facing the same circumstances) has a definite need to know how outdated and even corrupt the legal system has become, unable to protect you from the things that happened to this woman.

On November 15, 2006, Meredythe Penny Shafer suffered a stroke - her second since May 23 earlier that year. At the time, she had one heir, a son, Benjamin A. Shafer, who lived in New Jersey and is in the property management business - flipping mortgages for a quick profit and buying fixer-uppers, putting a little money into them and quickly reselling them for a quick profit. In her will, she had left him virtually everything and also had granted him power of attorney over her health and financial decisions should she be declared mentally incapacitated and unable to make her own decisions.

Over the course of the next several months she would see her son tell her doctors that "she will never be able to return home again" and that he would be taking complete control of her finances and health decisions - without benefit of a court finding of incompetence.

She would find herself held prisoner in a nursing home where her son had her put against her will, at the mercy of a corrupt doctor who, according to nursing home staff, billed Medicare for "patient visits" that never happened. When her son allegedly informed the nursing home he was intending to take her to New Jersey, to another nursing home, whether it was her will or not, the doctor illegally claimed she was "incompetent" and would be forced - by police if necessary - onto a plane to travel alone to New Jersey with a four-hour layover in Cincinnati, in a race against a judge trying to stop the transfer.

In this story you will discover how Penny's treatment so outraged one supervisor that she quit and offered to testify in court about Penny's "false imprisonment" - an issue that was the topic of heated staff discussions behind closed doors.

You will discover how an unethical conservator and a lawyer worked together to keep Penny imprisoned and under powerful psychotropic drugs such as morphine (for pain she never had or claimed to have). Both the conservator and lawyer were cited in a stunning investigative report by the Tennessee Comptroller General in which a group of people, supposedly acting as protectors of the elderly, had helped kidnap a terminally-ill patient from yet another nursing home and illegally taken them out of state to get out from under court jurisdiction. This same conservator was determined to have Penny put in a mental institution without the court's knowledge or approval - and also illegally wrote herself a $6,000 check without even asking the judge.

You will also discover how her fiancee (now her husband), who had no legal standing since he was not a blood relative, waged an uphill court battle against a team of lawyers to win his lady's freedom in a decision even the judge admitted was "very, very rare." You'll read how he took on the legal profession in a David-and-Goliath battle everyone said he was bound to lose.

You will also read the extortion letters from her son as he demanded her property, despite losing his court battle to have her committed, and you'll see the actual death threats from a jilted suitor-turned-stalker who was working hand-in-hand with her son, and tried to testify against her to put her in a mental institute.

More importantly, you will learn how you face the same illegal imprisonment in society which, more and more, believes the elderly should be euthanized to make way for "productive members of society." You will discover why the greatest dangers you face are probably from the greed of your own family members. You will see the actual "idiot test" used to declare a person incompetent on the flimsiest basis - and what you can do about it!

You'll also discover how the same thing is happening to tens of thousands of America's elderly, while the legal profession turns a blind eye to what some have called "elderly genocide" - and why current laws to protect the elderly and disabled from such abuse are a joke.

Ben Shafer with his trophy wife
on their wedding day