(chicago business) A Cook County jury awarded $2.2 million to the estate of a wealthy widow, the latest development in a long-running dispute with her former neighbor, a neurosurgeon.
The jury in the civil case found Dr. George Dohrmann had attempted to defraud Virginia “Ginny” Rogers, according to a statement from attorneys for Rogers’s estate.
Costly litigation to stop the fraud cost Rogers’ estate millions, which the Jan. 14 verdict said the doctor should pay.
A lawyer for Dohrmann could not be reached for comment.
Rogers’s wealth came from selling telecom company Rogers Aircall in the early 1980s following her husband’s death.
She and Dohrmann knew each other because each had a condo at Drake Tower along Lake Shore Drive.
They socialized at first, but Rogers “then became concerned that (Dohrmann) was befriending her in order to get her property upon her death,” said a 2014 opinion from the First District Illinois Appellate Court.
Dohrmann attempted to have Rogers adopt him as an adult, according to court records. In 2000, Rogers signed a document leaving him $4 million, plus her apartment and contents worth another $1.5 million, in exchange for changing his sons’ middle names to “Rogers.” The $5.5 million represented about a quarter of Rogers’s estate. Dohrmann sued Rogers to enforce the contract in 2007. In March 2008, a court found that she was disabled because of her “moderate dementia and probably Alzheimer’s,” court records said.
Rogers died in 2013 at the age of 101.
The $2.2 million awarded by the jury will go to a variety of charities, unless Dohrmann appeals the decision successfully. They include: Lurie Children’s Hospital, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Children’s Home & Aid Society of Illinois, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the Art Institute, WTTW-TV; the neuroscience department at Rush University Medical Center, for its Alzheimer’s work, and Rogers’s alma mater, Millikin University in Decatur.
