Lawmaker told court her mom had dementia in family property battle. Not so, said doctors
A California assemblywoman claimed her mother had dementia to seize control of family property, only for doctors to contradict her in court.
California Assemblymember Anamarie Ávila Farías told a court her mother suffered from dementia as part of an aggressive push to place her under a conservatorship. The move came during an ugly family fight over real estate. Doctors who examined her mother said otherwise.
Court records reveal the conservatorship petition was filed squarely in the middle of a dispute among relatives about who controlled valuable property. Farías’s claim that her mother lacked capacity wasn’t backed by medical evidence; physicians explicitly rejected the dementia diagnosis she had put forward.
The episode exposes how California’s conservatorship system, already under scrutiny for potential abuse, can be weaponized inside family battles over money and homes. Farías, a sitting lawmaker, tried to use the courts to sideline her own mother’s decision-making rights at the precise moment those rights mattered most to the property fight.
California law requires clear and convincing evidence before stripping someone of their civil rights through conservatorship. In this case, the medical professionals’ findings undercut the assemblywoman’s central allegation, leaving the petition without the factual foundation it needed.
The contradiction between what Farías asserted in filings and what doctors documented raises uncomfortable questions about elected officials who lecture the public on guardianship reform while appearing to test its boundaries at home. The family real estate dispute and the conservatorship attempt were not separate events; records show they were intertwined.
Whether this episode produces any formal consequences for the lawmaker remains unclear, but it adds one more documented instance of conservatorship being invoked not for protection, but for leverage.
Original reporting: CalMatters.
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