When Diana Multare was released from the hospital after a heart attack last May, Eric Houston was there for her. Mr. Houston, 69, a personal trainer, had met her at a Manhattan gym and started working with her five years earlier, and they had become close friends. Now Ms. Multare was 91 and had no living relatives, and Mr. Houston was happy to accompany her to her high-rise building in Morningside Heights.
Though he knew that her memory was starting to fail, she had always seemed capable and independent during their gym workouts. But when he entered her apartment, he was shocked.
Littered across the floor was several years’ worth of mail, including unopened bills and bank statements. He was worried about her. After her heart attack, Ms. Multare had been prescribed many medications, and he was afraid she wouldn’t remember to take them. Her next health crisis might strike when she was alone.
“I was concerned every night that she was going to die,” he said.
Around this time Mr. Houston found the Apsley, an assisted living facility at Broadway and West 85th Street, near both his apartment and the gym where he worked. If Ms. Multare lived there, he could visit more often. The Apsley’s website boasts gourmet meals, regular outings to Lincoln Center and high-quality medical care.
“It just seemed perfect,” Mr. Houston said.
Ms. Multare was not eager to leave her home, but she told Mr. Houston she would consider the Apsley if she could return to her apartment whenever she chose. He assured her that this was the case. But a one-bedroom unit at the Apsley would cost $28,000 a month, probably too much for Ms. Multare, who believed she had about half a million dollars in savings. To check, Mr. Houston said, he took her to a Citibank branch, where they both were surprised to learn that Ms. Multare had around $3 million in various accounts — enough to give assisted living a try. He helped her move in on June 4, 2025.
The next morning, she decided to leave.
The place was too fancy; Ms. Multare preferred the overheated clutter of her home. As she tried to leave, though, employees of the Apsley intervened. A staff member called Mr. Houston and told him that Ms. Multare had dementia, he said. She could no longer make important decisions, said the employee, who asked about placing Ms. Multare in the facility’s dementia ward, Mr. Houston said.
“Absolutely not,” Mr. Houston remembered saying before running to the Apsley. One of his clients at the gym had told him about her father, who she said had been virtually imprisoned in the dementia ward of an assisted living facility in Boston; it had taken the chaos of the Covid pandemic to get him released. Now Mr. Houston imagined that the same fate awaited Diana, living in a locked ward and drained of her wealth until she was either penniless or dead.
“They were trying to kidnap her,” Mr. Houston said.
Through a spokeswoman, the Apsley and its parent company, Sunrise Senior Living, denied holding Ms. Multare against her will.
What would follow was a tense standoff, with mistrust, arguments and insinuations of theft coming from both sides. At the center of the battle was a vulnerable woman with a weakened heart and a memory so unreliable that she had forgotten she was a multimillionaire.
Suspicions
The first indication to employees at the Apsley that something might be off about Mr. Houston came almost the moment he and Ms. Multare entered the facility. When she checked in, her only personal item was a single bag he had packed with some T-shirts and a few toiletries. There were no pants, no changes of underwear. Margaret Quinn, the Apsley’s executive director, found this unusual, and she recorded it in a “move in” note. (Mr. Houston later said that he retrieved more of Ms. Multare’s personal items from her apartment that day.)
These details were provided by Mr. Houston and Colleen Kerwick, the lawyer who represents Mr. Houston and Ms. Multare in a lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. It accuses the Apsley and Sunrise Senior Living of wrongful restraint, fraud and defamation.
In a brief meeting in her office, Ms. Quinn declined to comment for this article. Representatives of the Apsley and Sunrise Senior Living declined a request for an interview. In court filings, Sunrise Senior Living denied all allegations by Mr. Houston and Ms. Multare. At the company’s request, the case was moved in November to federal court in the Southern District of New York.
“We disagree with and will defend against the characterizations and allegations” made by Mr. Houston, said Heather Hunter, a spokeswoman for Sunrise Senior Living. “We take the privacy, safety and security of our residents very seriously and will not be commenting further.”
Ms. Kerwick, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, provided The New York Times with access to her clients and 627 pages of discovery documents from the lawsuit, but she later cut off all communication when she learned that The Times had asked the Apsley to provide its side of the story. Mr. Houston and Ms. Kerwick had wanted to speak with a reporter “only for a story about how sealed systems operate; how the rhetoric of ‘privacy’ is used to silence cognitively intact elders; and how helpers are punished when they interfere with lucrative institutional arrangements,” Ms. Kerwick wrote in a letter to The Times.
Before Ms. Multare moved in, Mr. Houston said, the Apsley had required her to grant someone power of attorney to make financial decisions on her behalf in case she became incapacitated. She chose Mr. Houston. But the document, signed on May 30, incorrectly referred to “Diane” Multare instead of “Diana” in two places. Ms. Multare crossed out both errors, wrote her correct name in black pen and initialed each correction.
According to documents in the lawsuit, Ms. Quinn found all of this suspicious. She assumed that Ms. Multare had arrived as a permanent resident, her notes say. But in a conversation with her, the executive director found that Ms. Multare “did not realize” that Mr. Houston “had moved her to the Apsley to live,” Ms. Quinn wrote. “She stated she would never have agreed to that. She did not remember signing the P.O.A. but did agree it was her signature.”
Other people also had concerns. Joy Reese was probably Ms. Multare’s oldest friend; the two had met in New York in 1960, when they were both 27. Ms. Reese later moved to Chicago, but they remained close, traveling regularly to Europe. Ms. Multare is godmother to Ms. Reese’s daughter, Julie Walsh.
Now a 62-year-old art curator, Ms. Walsh travels to New York often for business. So after she and her mother learned about Ms. Multare’s heart attack and her move to assisted living, Ms. Reese decided to accompany her daughter on a work trip to the city. They visited the Apsley the day after Ms. Multare moved in.
The women spent much of the next three days together, and Ms. Multare seemed cheerful as ever, and unfailingly friendly to everyone. But Ms. Walsh noticed that Ms. Multare would become anxious when she saw Mr. Houston arguing with staff members. She also said her godmother would often forget a conversation five minutes after it happened.
Medical professionals had conflicting views about Ms. Multare’s condition. Shortly after she left the hospital, her primary care doctor, Sonica Bhatia, found that Ms. Multare showed signs of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, according to test results included in court documents shared by Sunrise Senior Living.
On a medical checklist recorded by an employee at the Apsley, Alzheimer’s disease is Ms. Multare’s top diagnosis. But several pages later, the same form asks whether the patient has “advanced dementia or cognitive impairment.” The response: No.
Conflicting diagnoses about memory are common, said Paul S. Appelbaum, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University. Brain function, he said, is not a binary switch; memories that have faded can reappear. A person with failing memory might be more lucid in the afternoon than in the morning, or vice versa.
“These are tough calls,” Dr. Appelbaum said.
At the Apsley, Ms. Multare’s friends began to debate what should happen next. Ms. Walsh found the facility impressive.
“I was really struck by how well everything ran, and how warm the staff was, and how much effort they were making to help make Diana feel welcome and at home,” she said. Ms. Walsh had formerly worked as a psychologist for nursing homes in Chicago, evaluating residents for a range of conditions including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.
This positive opinion of the Apsley alarmed Mr. Houston, who still believed there was a plot to lock Ms. Multare away and steal her money.
On June 9, her fifth day at the Apsley, Ms. Multare received a visit from a social worker with Adult Protective Services, a city agency that protects seniors from abuse and exploitation. Joining them in a conference room off the lobby were Mr. Houston, Ms. Walsh and Ms. Reese. The social worker warned Mr. Houston that the power of attorney was in doubt; that meant no more trips to banks or having Ms. Multare sign documents. He was Ms. Multare’s trainer and friend, the social worker said, nothing more.
The Standoff
Shaken by the meeting, Mr. Houston went home and contacted Ms. Kerwick, a lawyer who had been recommended to him. She instructed him to return to the Apsley soon and to refuse to leave without Ms. Multare, according to interviews with Mr. Houston and Ms. Kerwick. If he waited even 24 hours, Ms. Kerwick told him, the Apsley would seek temporary guardianship over Ms. Multare and a restraining order against Mr. Houston, stripping his power of attorney and empowering the facility to decide her fate.
“You have to get Diana out of there immediately,” Ms. Kerwick told him.
So the next day, Mr. Houston went to the Apsley, called Ms. Kerwick, put her on speakerphone, and demanded Ms. Multare’s release. Ms. Quinn, the executive director, was joined by Tom Cana, the general manager.
The two sides argued for nearly an hour, Mr. Houston said. Ms. Quinn called the changes to Ms. Multare’s power of attorney document “red flags.”
Via speakerphone, Ms. Kerwick countered that the document was legal and fully in force, and the Apsley could not keep Ms. Multare against her will.
Eventually the parties agreed that Mr. Cana could ask Ms. Multare one question: Wouldn’t she rather stay?
The Apsley was awfully nice, Mr. Houston recalled her saying, but she wanted to leave.
And so on June 10, Ms. Multare and Mr. Houston hailed a cab and left the Apsley.
At Home
By October, Ms. Multare had eased back into her life in the apartment in Morningside Heights where she had lived since 1976. Mr. Houston hired health aides to provide round-the-clock supervision, and her mail was now sorted into neat piles on her desk.
Mr. Houston visited often, leading Ms. Multare through squatting exercises and modified push-ups to keep her strength. He knew she loved animals, so he took her to his sister’s home and horse farm in rural Connecticut, where she enjoyed petting horses and feeding them carrots.
Throughout Ms. Multare’s time at the Apsley, Mr. Houston never wavered in his belief that his friend was mentally competent. In the months that followed, he hired a psychiatrist named Gary Collins to administer cognitive tests to Ms. Multare, and he was buoyed by the results. Ms. Multare received a perfect score on one test, and scored 29 points out of 30 on another — excellent results for someone her age, Dr. Collins noted in his report.
For Mr. Houston, the issue was put to rest. “She does not have dementia,” he said.
Sitting on her red couch during a recent interview with The Times, Ms. Multare looked around and smiled. She liked the view from her balcony, she said, and seeing her sister’s paintings on the walls.
Mr. Houston stood at her side. He reached down. She reached up, wrapped her hand around his and smiled.
“I trust Eric,” she said. “I feel very fortunate for this relationship.”
Ms. Reese and Ms. Walsh both said they appreciated Mr. Houston for all the care he had given their friend. They noted, however, that ever since their disagreement about the Apsley, Ms. Reese has been unable to reach Ms. Multare, and they fear that Mr. Houston has blocked Ms. Reese’s number on her phone. That would be a tragic way for a friendship of 66 years to end, they said.
“Now Eric is really the only person that she sees,” Ms. Walsh said.
Mr. Houston said he had not blocked Ms. Multare’s friends.
“Diana can talk to them, or anyone she wants, anytime,” he said.
Though they met late in life, Mr. Houston is familiar with Ms. Multare’s story. She grew up with her older sister, Aline, in a townhouse on West 85th Street, where the family lived in the basement apartment and rented the floors above.
“Central Park was my playground,” she said in an interview.
Mr. Houston had assumed his friend’s money came from the sale of that property and another her parents had owned on the Upper West Side.
“Her parents bought two townhouses, and when they died, Diana and her sister inherited a lot of money,” Mr. Houston said.
City property records indicate that the buildings were indeed sold decades ago, but netted the Multare sisters little money. In fact, most of Ms. Multare’s money came from two sources, according to retirement and property records. One was her pension: She had been a professor at what was then called Norwalk Community College, in Connecticut, a fact that neither Mr. Houston nor Ms. Reese had known, and that Ms. Multare did not remember.
She also owned a house in Long Branch, N.J., where she led a group of homeowners in a fight against the mayor, who planned to take their properties by eminent domain. She gained a reputation as a fiery and intellectual advocate, said Denise Hoagland, an ally in the eminent domain fight, which ended in Ms. Multare’s beating City Hall and keeping her home, which she eventually sold for $3.1 million, three times the city’s offer.
“She was a whip,” Ms. Hoagland recalled.
When Mr. Houston met Ms. Multare at the Equinox gym on the Upper West Side in 2020, they clicked immediately. They shared a love for the arts — Mr. Houston regaled her with stories of his life as a concert pianist and his time working at the Royalton Hotel’s restaurant (he liked to say that he was Anna Wintour’s favorite waiter), and he had written plays and a novel before becoming, at the age of 63, a personal trainer.
He was also born wealthy, having received an inheritance from his grandfather, a successful industrialist.
“He doesn’t need Diana’s money,” said Renee Bradley, 71, Mr. Houston’s sister, who shared in the family’s inheritance.
In the end, the Apsley waived all charges for Ms. Multare’s six-day stay, though the lawsuit continues. Workers from Adult Protective Services have visited Ms. Multare’s apartment several times, Mr. Houston said, a confirmation in his eyes that he is being targeted.
If he really was trying to steal her money, he reasoned, why would he persuade her to move into an assisted living facility that costs $28,000 a month?
“I think of Diana as family, and I’m very committed to her,” Mr. Houston said. “Diana and I don’t care about her money.”
Sitting on her couch, Ms. Multare chatted with Mr. Houston and Ms. Kerwick about the Apsley. Her memories of the place seemed to advance and retreat, like fog. Her clearest recollection was that it had been Mr. Houston’s idea for her to move there. Mr. Houston gave an embarrassed laugh.
“Yes, that’s the thing you always remember,” he said.
Ms. Multare did not remember that she had wanted to leave the Apsley, she said, or that she’d had to fight to do so. Nor did she recall the lawsuit. But after some prompting, she remembered her intention to prevent the Apsley from locking people away to steal their money.
“I’m concerned about the fact that this could happen to others,” she said finally.
A few minutes passed. Ms. Multare’s friend and her lawyer talked about Adult Protective Services, the Apsley and what they believe was a coordinated plot.
They asked Ms. Multare what she thought. She apologized. She did not remember her time at the Apsley at all.
“I’m sorry about my memory,” she said. “That’s my biggest problem. I don’t remember anything.”
Christopher Maag is a reporter covering the New York City region for The Times.
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