What You Have to Know
- Heather Bari Gottlieb was a transitions specialist at Constancy.
- Her property desires to dam MetLife, her group life supplier, from paying advantages to a person named as a beneficiary.
- The insurer says the property has no real interest in the life insurance coverage advantages and no standing to carry the go well with.
The household of a lady who died in July 2023 is asking a state courtroom to have $150,000 in group life insurance coverage advantages paid to her property, fairly than to a person named as a beneficiary, based mostly on allegations that the person pressured the lady to call him as a coverage beneficiary.
The property of Heather Bari Gottlieb asserts in a grievance filed in a state courtroom in Mercer County, New Jersey, that the person, Daniel Dalziel, made Gottlieb preserve him on as a half beneficiary for her life insurance coverage advantages and a sole beneficiary for her retirement account belongings by threatening to kill her, and that Gottlieb supposed to take away the person as a beneficiary earlier than she died.
The go well with names Constancy Brokerage Companies as a defendant, together with MetLife and Dalziel, as a result of Gottlieb labored for Constancy Investments and had MetLife group life protection offered by her employer.
What it means: The Gottlieb case may have a bearing on efforts by estates to affect demise profit distributions from group life insurance policies ruled by the Worker Retirement Earnings Safety Act, or ERISA.
Heather Bari Gottlieb: Gottlieb was born in 1975 and grew up in New Jersey.
She labored for UBS as a consumer service affiliate from 2011 via 2021 after which as a transition specialist at Constancy, in accordance with her LinkedIn web page.
As a transition specialist, she helped purchasers with transactions reminiscent of retirement account rollovers.
She lived with Dalziel in Little Silver, New Jersey, and had an “unhealthy and dysfunctional protracted relationship with defendant Dalziel,” in accordance with the Gottlieb property’s grievance.
Dalziel has a conviction for armed theft, and he was convicted of committing easy assault towards Gottlieb in 2020.
The state alleges that Dalziel typically hit Gottlieb, gave her black eyes, coerced her into letting him dwell in her residence, stole from her, and coerced her into naming him as a life insurance coverage and retirement account beneficiary.
The opposite life insurance coverage coverage beneficiary was Gottlieb’s mom, Carol Gottlieb.