Legal Question in Elder Law in New York

Hello,

I am a co-guardian for my aging mother, who is physically healthy but is declining mentally. We have had to extricate her from an abusive situation, and are struggling with interference from the abuser.

The second party in question is a younger woman with MS. We will refer to her simply as LH. She and our mother were friends for many years, and lived together until recently. As our mother's mental health has gone downhill, LH's physical health has deteriorated, causing her to require more and more personal assistance, which has become less and less appropriate for a 92-year-old to be performing. In addition, our mother's declining mental state was making it impossible for her to understand this, or to set any limits. LH also has a mentally-disabled adult daughter who lived with them, whose behavioral issues presented another whole challenge that our mother did not need to be dealing with. Meanwhile, LH was having our mother drive her around to endless medical appointments and such, while our mother's health was usually neglected. She also took control of all of the finances in the household, and was known to be ordering expensive Kindle Fires and L.L. Bean clothing for herself online, while our mother's creditors were calling her about payments that were in arrears. All of us expressed concerns about this bad situation, but nothing ever changed for the better.

Matters came to ahead a few months ago, when we accidentally learned that LH, increasingly leery of our influence, had made secret plans to move all of them to another state, over 1000 miles away. We intervened at the last moment, resulting in LH having to go ahead with her plans, but without our mother. We obtained guardianship of our mom, who now lives with my sister.

This would be an improvement, but for the fact that LH has been in constant contact with our mother by phone, At first, she called our mother numerous times, crying that we had "torn them apart", and that they had to find a way to bring them back together. We knew this was counter-productive, so we blocked our mother's phone from receiving LH's calls. Unfortunately, many years of subservience have left our mother trained to "check in" with LH, and the conversation resumed with her calling LH herself... at least once a day. We could simply take away her phone, but we don't feel right about that.

Our poor mother's memory is so poor, she can never recall the details of the conversations, beyond 10 or 15 minutes. But it leaves her in an unsettled state, feeling that things simply aren't right in her world. And we overhear some of the conversations, which consist of LH urging her over and over to find some way to public transportation and "escape", to get control of her money back, any way she can think of for our mother to leave our care and return to LH's side... where her personal assistance and extra income are now sorely missed.

Any overt attempt by LH to remove her -- physically take her away -- would land LH in jail, as a judge's binding order indicates that she is to remain with my sister. But she continues to hammer these thoughts into our mother's head, causing her to remain upset and depressed. And we are afraid to leave her alone for long, for fear that LH will talk her into "borrowing" a car and simply driving away.

Is there some legal means we an use, some kind of leverage with teeth, that can put a stop to this, and allow our mother's life to become peaceful once more?

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