By Steve Moran

By the time I sat down to talk with Jack Scarola, Keith Myers’s attorney, the shape of this case had already shifted once. It’s worth walking through how, because it tells you something the press releases didn’t.

Myers’s original April 2026 complaint named MorseLife itself as a defendant, along with thirteen individual board and community members, and included a breach-of-contract claim over his severance. MorseLife responded by demanding arbitration, arguing that even though Myers never personally signed the Amplifii management agreement, his compensation claims still fell under that contract’s arbitration clause. Rather than fight that in court, Myers’s team filed an amended complaint that dropped MorseLife and the contract claim entirely, leaving thirteen pure defamation counts against thirteen individuals. Then, Amplifii, the company, not Myers personally, separately filed its own new lawsuit against MorseLife over the management agreement, attaching the actual contract as an exhibit.

So there are now three threads, not one: a defamation case, a contract case, and whatever gets resolved in arbitration. That’s worth knowing before you read anything either side says publicly, because each thread is being fought in a different forum with a different burden of proof.

A Conversation With Myers’s Attorney

Scarola was direct about one thing right away: he isn’t in the business of defending the board’s judgment. “I’m not here to tell you that this contract is a model of appropriate exercise of fiduciary responsibility,” he told me. “Our case is about whether Keith Myers stole money.” 

That’s a fair distinction, and it’s the one a jury will actually have to decide. A board can make a genuinely bad deal with its eyes open without the person on the other end of that deal having committed a crime.

He also pushed back on the idea that Amplifii was a bare pass-through, pointing to the newly public contract and its lengthy schedule of duties, financial reporting, HR, recruitment, an entire fundraising operation. Fair enough, the contract is real, and it is detailed.

But when I asked him directly how many employees Amplifii actually had, he told me he didn’t know. That’s the same question I couldn’t get answered anywhere else in this reporting, and it’s the one that actually matters. A list of services tells you what was promised. It doesn’t tell you who did the work.

A Point Worth Considering

Scarola also made a point I hadn’t fully considered: that whether the fee was 5 percent paid to Amplifii or the same dollar amount paid out as salaries to three or four named executives, the money leaving the organization is the same. That’s true as far as it goes. 

But it dodges the actual concern, which isn’t the size of the number in isolation; it’s whether the organization got a genuine third-party operating company for that money, or whether it got two of its own executives collecting a management fee for doing the jobs they were already being paid to do.

I asked him where the idea to structure it this way, rather than as ordinary disclosed compensation, actually came from. He said he didn’t know whether it originated with Myers or with the board. Neither, it turns out, does anyone else I’ve asked.

A Detail That Complicates the Board’s Story

Amplifii’s new lawsuit against MorseLife includes something that deserves more attention than it’s gotten. MorseLife terminated the management agreement in June 2025 without citing any of the specific grounds the contract required for termination, according to Amplifii’s complaint. 

And separately, MorseLife required Myers to return money Amplifii had already been paid for 2023 and 2024.

Think about the timing. In December 2024, the compensation committee reviewed an independent reasonableness assessment and formally resolved that the fee was fair market value. 

Six months later, the organization was demanding money back. Either the board’s confidence in that finding didn’t survive first contact with public scrutiny, or it was never as solid as the minutes made it sound. Both are worse than the story MorseLife has told publicly: that Myers deceived a board that otherwise did everything right.

Nobody Looks Good Here

At this point I don’t think the public record gives anyone in this story much to be proud of. The board did more homework on the Amplifii deal than it first appeared to, but that homework rested on an assumption about what Amplifii actually did that no one, including Myers’s own attorney, could independently verify. 

The fee ran for years on a formula that skimmed a piece of every charitable gift before anyone fixed that specific problem. And when the arrangement became a public liability, the same board that had called it fair and reasonable six months earlier moved to terminate it and claw money back, without, as far as the record shows, ever explaining what changed.

Myers and his CFO benefited enormously from a structure they were far better positioned to understand than the people approving it, and the actual staffing behind that structure has never been demonstrated publicly, including now, with the contract itself finally in view.

And five years earlier, the organization’s own leadership treated scarce, life-saving vaccine doses partly as a fundraising channel.

Myers’s own lawsuit, notably, no longer asks a court to weigh in on the fairness of any of it. His claims are now purely about specific statements made about him. Amplifii’s separate suit is about a broken contract and an unpaid termination fee. 

The question with the most to teach the rest of the industry, whether this was ever a real management company or a compensation structure wearing one, isn’t actually the subject of any pending claim. It’ll probably surface anyway, since truth is a defense to defamation, but it’s worth knowing that’s not what anyone is formally litigating right now.

The Industry Lesson

There’s a tendency in senior living, as in any business, to make ethical questions more complicated than they need to be. We hire lawyers. We commission benchmarking studies. We form committees. All of that has its place, and MorseLife’s board actually did more of it here than the early reporting gave them credit for.

None of it replaces the one question that would have changed both of these stories: if every resident, family member, employee, and donor understood exactly what we were doing, and exactly what we were and weren’t independently verifying before we approved it, would we still be comfortable defending it?

Nobody vaccinating 290 people from the same country club wants that explained to a family whose loved one in another building was still waiting. Nobody structuring a fee that included charitable gifts in its calculation for years, however many lawyers signed off on the concept, wants that explained to the donor who wrote the check.

That question is available to every leader and every board in every organization before a resolution is ever signed. At MorseLife, on two separate occasions five years apart, it doesn’t look like anyone asked it in a way that actually tested the answer. That, more than who wins any of these three lawsuits, is the part senior living leaders should remember.

A Word About Ownership

I want to add one more gentle note here. The not-for-profit portion of senior living frequently and very publicly portrays itself as being on the side of angels, suggesting that for-profit operators are somehow on the other side.

The truth is that there are some amazing for-profit operators who are serving residents and family members in remarkable ways. There are also some not-for-profit organizations that are doing some pretty un-angel-like things.

We need to be celebrating great operators regardless of ownership status and condemning bad actors regardless of their ownership status.

Doing that will go a long way toward making people trust and fall in love with senior living.