A Widow's Two Federal Lawsuits Say the Lockout Was Approved, Then Billed

In September 2024, at a hearing in a Union County guardianship case, a care home operator testified under oath about how the doors of her facility came to be locked against a resident's wife.

"My licensing, adult foster home licensing, they gave us permission to follow what the guardians were requesting to keep Patty out of the inside of the facility," Tempie Bartell testified, according to the hearing transcript quoted in a federal complaint. "And I had to wait until licensing approved that order." Then: "That's when we were able to lock the doors and there were no more issues with her coming in."

That testimony now sits near the center of two federal lawsuits. The guardians it refers to are Russell Bingaman's sons, and they are not defendants in either case.

Patricia Bingaman of Imbler filed both in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon in late July. Neither has been decided. No defendant has answered yet, and everything the complaints say is, at this stage, allegation. The filings are public records, and anyone can read them; the case numbers are at the end of this article.

The first case is a civil rights action under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983. It names two employees of the Oregon Department of Human Services' aging and disability program in La Grande, Aaron Lenox and Erin Smith, each sued as an individual; Tempie Bartell; Bartell's company Nadine's Nest, LLC, which operated the adult foster home where Patricia's husband Russell lived; and Mallory Kenney, the manager of the department's public records unit, also sued as an individual. The case is assigned to United States District Judge Michael H. Simon.

The second is a civil racketeering action. It names attorney J. Glenn Null; Mammen and Null, Lawyers, LLC, the firm the complaint identifies as his former one; Catalyst Law, LLC, which the complaint describes as the continuation of that practice; Heart 'n Home Hospice and Palliative Care, LLC; Bartell; and Nadine's Nest.

I am a plaintiff in the first case, on one count of my own. I am not a party to the second. I have spent two years investigating what happened to Russell Bingaman, and Valor Investigates is my publication. Readers should weigh everything here with that disclosed.

WHAT THE CIVIL RIGHTS COMPLAINT ALLEGES

The heart of the first case is a lockout. The complaint alleges that from early July 2024 until a court hearing that September, approximately sixty-seven consecutive days, Patricia was blocked from visiting her husband of fifty-eight years, and that no court order authorized any of it.

What made the exclusion possible, the complaint alleges, was the state. It pleads that on July 10, 2024, facility and agency staff coordinated the restriction in a chain of emails under the subject line "Bingaman - Patty Restriction" and that on a multi-party call the same day, an ODHS supervisor said the facility could lock its door to keep Patricia out. Bartell's own sworn testimony, quoted above, is pleaded as direct evidence that the state defendants authorized and directed the exclusion, making the facility's conduct what the complaint calls joint action under color of state law.

The complaint also quotes the agency's own file against itself. When ODHS investigated an earlier attempt to restrict Patricia's visits, its report found the restriction "was in violation of the Individual Based Limitations rules" and stated, "The IBL will be removed and no restrictions on visitation will be initiated." The lockout that followed, the complaint alleges, went forward anyway. A hospice recertification note from August 2024, quoted in the complaint in the chart's own capital letters, recorded the result: "WIFE IS LEGALLY BANNED FROM SEEING PATIENT."

Russell Bingaman died on January 29, 2025. Neither lawsuit claims that any defendant caused his death, and no wrongful death claim appears in either case.

My own count in the case is narrower. It alleges that the manager of the ODHS public records unit retaliated against me, as a journalist, for my reporting, my public records requests, and my petitions to the Attorney General and the courts, including through what the complaint calls knowingly false certifications: that a certified appeal package was "never received" although the state's designated receiving agent had signed for it and photographed it inside ODHS headquarters, and that no responsive text messages were found although the complaint sets that statement against four filed exhibits of text messages. That claim, like every other, is an allegation the court has not ruled on.

WHAT THE RACKETEERING COMPLAINT ALLEGES

The second complaint describes what it calls an enterprise. Its second paragraph states the theory in one breath, and the words that follow are the complaint's own: the facility operator "invented a visitation restriction no agency or court had authorized," "monetized it" by surcharging Russell's own funds $1,000 every month for "visitation restriction non-compliance," and "had it laundered into a medical order and then a court order."

The complaint pleads that the lawyers Patricia paid with her own money to fight the restriction billed her while managing the calendar of her husband's final days; that the hospice documented the family's exclusion in its charts and billed Medicare through it all; and that when the family sought records, the participants blocked and delayed. It quotes a February 2023 email in which, sixteen months before the lockout, Bartell rescinded an earlier set of visitation guidelines and wrote, "It was brought to my attention that I can not restrict visitors."

The complaint brings six counts: federal racketeering and racketeering conspiracy, Oregon racketeering and conspiracy, financial abuse of a vulnerable person, and loss of consortium. Patricia sues on her own injuries and her own money. The complaint states she asserts no claim belonging to Russell's estate.

WHO IS NOT BEING SUED

Both complaints go out of their way to say who is not a defendant, and those passages deserve the same prominence as the accusations.

The racketeering complaint states at its third paragraph: "Plaintiff does not sue any judicial officer, any state agency, or any court-appointed guardian." The civil rights complaint says of Russell's sons, in its own words: "Shawn Bingaman and Austin Bingaman, Russell's sons and court-appointed co-guardians (Union County Circuit Court No. 23PR02271), are not defendants. Their recorded communications are pleaded below solely as evidence of the state authorization and of the named defendants' joint action." Neither complaint names any of Russell's children as a defendant, and no claim is asserted against any of them.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Waiver-of-service packets are going to the defendants this week; no defendant has been served yet. A defendant who returns a waiver does not have to answer until sixty days after the waiver request was mailed, and a defendant served in person has twenty-one days after service. The complaints' allegations remain untested until then, and possibly long after. The two cases were flagged to the court as related, and both captions, filings, and future orders are available to the public through the federal courts' PACER system: Bingaman et al v. Lenox et al, No. 2:26-cv-01568, and Bingaman v. Null et al, No. 2:26-cv-01585, District of Oregon.

Levi Bakke is an investigative journalist and the founder of Valor Investigates, a small 501(c)(3) nonprofit newsroom in La Grande. He is a plaintiff on one count of the civil rights case described above. Patricia Bingaman is the plaintiff in both cases and brings the racketeering case alone. Reach him at info@valorinvestigates.com or (541) 655-3157, appointment only.