Woman's Estate Sues MetLife, Fidelity Over Where Death Benefits Should Go
What You Need to Know
Heather Bari Gottlieb was a transitions specialist at Fidelity.
Her estate wants to block MetLife, her group life provider, from paying benefits to a man named as a beneficiary.
The insurer says the estate has no interest in the life insurance benefits and no standing to bring the suit.
The family of a woman who died in July 2023 is asking a state court to have $150,000 in group life insurance benefits paid to her estate, rather than to a man named as a beneficiary, based on allegations that the man forced the woman to name him as a policy beneficiary.
The estate of Heather Bari Gottlieb asserts in a complaint filed in a state court in Mercer County, New Jersey, that the man, Daniel Dalziel, made Gottlieb keep him on as a half beneficiary for her life insurance benefits and a sole beneficiary for her retirement account assets by threatening to kill her, and that Gottlieb intended to remove the man as a beneficiary before she died.
The suit names Fidelity Brokerage Services as a defendant, along with MetLife and Dalziel, because Gottlieb worked for Fidelity Investments and had MetLife group life coverage provided by her employer.
What it means: The Gottlieb case could have a bearing on efforts by estates to influence death benefit distributions from group life policies governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA.
Heather Bari Gottlieb: Gottlieb was born in 1975 and grew up in New Jersey.
She worked for UBS as a client service associate from 2011 through 2021 and then as a transition specialist at Fidelity, according to her LinkedIn page.
As a transition specialist, she helped clients with transactions such as retirement account rollovers.
She lived with Dalziel in Little Silver, New Jersey, and had an “unhealthy and dysfunctional protracted relationship with defendant Dalziel,” according to the Gottlieb estate’s complaint.
Dalziel has a conviction for armed robbery, and he was convicted of committing simple assault against Gottlieb in 2020.
The state alleges that Dalziel often hit Gottlieb, gave her black eyes, coerced her into letting him live in her apartment, stole from her, and coerced her into naming him as a life insurance and retirement account beneficiary.
The other life insurance policy beneficiary was Gottlieb’s mother, Carol Gottlieb.
Gottlieb “finally was able to end her relationship with defendant Dalziel and forced him to move out of her home, but still lived in fear of him, to the point where she had security cameras installed in an effort to detect his presence,” according to the complaint.
