J’ACCUSE

IN JANUARY 2021, GAETANE GAGNON’S CARDIOLOGIST GAVE HER 6 MONTHS TO LIVE.

In MARCH2021, Valerie Gagnon WHO TRAVELED FROM PORTUGAL STRICTLY FOR THAT PURPOSED enrolled her mother with VITAS, a palliative care organization. Their conclusion was immediate and unambiguous: Gaetane Gagnon was dying because she had not been receiving her mandatory medications. This was not a natural decline. This was the direct and foreseeable consequence of P.P. Gagnon’s interference with her cardiac medications — interference that Dr. Scott Leaf had witnessed daily and done nothing to stop. A physician who watches a man sabotage his wife’s life-sustaining medications and remains silent is not a bystander. He is complicit. The VITAS finding transforms what might otherwise be characterized as negligence into something far more serious: ACTIVE ENDANGERMENT. Dr. Leaf was present. He knew. And while Gaetane Gagnon was being medicated into a six-month death sentence, he was busy positioning himself as her legal guardian and conspiring with Lynn Craig and Foster Friedman to extract her property. It was only after Valerie Gagnon watched the Netflix film I Care a Lot — a thriller about a predatory court-appointed guardian who manufactures the incapacity of wealthy elderly victims, strips them of their homes and assets, and isolates them from their families — that she fully understood the architecture of what was being done to her mother. The parallel was exact. She acted. In 2024, Gaetane Gagnon removed Dr. Scott Leaf as her legal guardian and replaced him with her daughter.

What renders Dr. Scott Leaf’s conduct particularly egregious is his insertion of himself as legal guardian in Gaetane Gagnon’s trust. Dr. Leaf was a friends of the family who had been given his own keys to the residence. He visited daily and witnessed firsthand the deterioration of her mother’s health. He watched P.P. Gagnon interfere with Gaetane’s cardiac medications. rather than intervening as any person of conscience would, he positioned himself to benefit from it — placing himself as legal guardian in the very trust that controls Gaetane Gagnon’s assets and care. In law, this is the textbook definition of UNDUE INFLUENCE: exploiting proximity to a vulnerable person to gain legal and financial control over them. For a man who then participated in the choreographed setup at 511 Princess Street — fabricating a scene designed to have Valerie Gagnon arrested and removed — the guardianship appointment is not incidental. It is the motive.

What Valerie Gagnon learned from members of the household staff was that Dr. Scott Leaf was not acting alone. He was operating in concert with Lynn Craig and Foster Friedman, the drafting lawyer — the same Friedman who appears elsewhere in this account. Together, the three of them were pressuring Gaetane Gagnon to sign over her total rights to the residential property at Bulfinch Square, and to agree to be placed in an assisted living facility in Virginia. This was asset extraction. An elderly woman, already isolated , was being surrounded by individuals who stood to benefit from her dispossession — and who were simultaneously working to remove her daughter, the one person who might have stopped them. The coordination between Dr. Scott Leaf, Lynn Craig, and Foster Friedman — all present in the same house, all pushing in the same direction — was not coincidental. It was a conspiracy against Gaetane Gagnon’s autonomy, her property, and her relationship with her daughter.

Then, within just a few months of Gaetane Gagnon being enrolled with VITAS — a palliative care program that had already identified that she was dying due to withheld medications — Dr. Scott Leaf, acting in his capacity as legal guardian, unilaterally un-enrolled her from VITAS. He removed her from the only professional medical oversight that had accurately diagnosed her condition and was working to correct it. This was not a medical decision. VITAS had given Gaetane Gagnon a fighting chance — they had identified the problem, named it, and begun addressing it. Dr. Leaf shut that down. The man who had watched her be medicated into a six-month death sentence, who had blocked her daughter from accessing her medical file with a false accusation, now removed the one organization that was actually trying to save her life. If there was any remaining doubt about whether Dr. Scott Leaf’s presence in Gaetane Gagnon’s life was protective or predatory, his decision to un-enroll her from VITAS eliminates it.

But for Dr. Scott Leaf and his co-conspirators, the un-enrollment carried an unintended consequence. VITAS had now formally documented what Valerie Gagnon had been saying all along: that Gaetane Gagnon was not receiving her mandatory medications, and that this was the reason she was dying. That finding existed on the record. It could not be erased. Faced with that documentation — and with Valerie Gagnon having formally accused her father of interfering with her mother’s medications — the conspirators appear to have understood that their scheme was in danger of being fully uncovered. And so, quietly, the medication interference stopped. Gaetane Gagnon began receiving her medications. Her condition stabilized. She did not die in the six months VITAS had predicted. She outlived her husband, Dr. Pierre Paul Gagnon. Gaetane Gagnon passed in July 2025. The VITAS record stands as the most damning single document in this case: it names the cause, it names the timeline, and it exists precisely because Dr. Scott Leaf and those around him thought they could control what was known. They could not.

When Valerie Gagnon understood what Dr. Scott Leaf had done — that he had inserted himself as legal guardian in her mother’s trust, positioning himself to control Gaetane Gagnon’s assets and medical decisions — she acted immediately. She convinced her mother of the danger. In 2024, Gaetane Gagnon removed Dr. Scott Leaf as legal guardian and replaced him with her daughter, Valerie Gagnon. That Gaetane Gagnon was able to make this decision — clearly, voluntarily, and of her own will — directly contradicts any narrative that she was incapable of independent judgment. It also confirms that once the truth was made plain to her, she chose her daughter over the man who had spent years in her home while conspiring against that daughter. Dr. Scott Leaf’s guardianship was not earned. It was taken. And when Gaetane Gagnon was given the full picture, she took it back.

There is one final element that completes the picture of Dr. Scott Leaf’s conduct — and it is perhaps the most calculated detail of all. In 2021, Valerie Gagnon herself initiated a file with Adult Protective Services against her own father, P.P. Gagnon, formally requesting that the City of Alexandria appoint a legal guardian for her mother. She was not the subject of that file. She built it. It was her alarm, her documentation, her attempt to bring the system in to protect Gaetane Gagnon from what was being done to her. Adult Protective Services sent a representative to the residence. Dr. Scott Leaf was there. He saw them. He knew the file existed. And then — with full knowledge of that APS record, and with full knowledge of what it documented — he contacted Adult Protective Services and told them that Valerie Gagnon had been beating her mother. The institution Valerie had built to protect Gaetane was turned against her daughter by the very man she had been trying to expose. That is not opportunism. That is premeditation. As for the setup at 511 Princess Street — where Dr. Leaf and Lynn Craig claimed to have witnessed Valerie attack her father — the Alexandria police did not charge her with battery. Not because they lacked witnesses. Because battery requires a trial. A trial means discovery. And discovery would have exposed everything: the VITAS records, the medication interference, the APS file Valerie had built, the witness present at 511 Princess Street, and the communications between Dr. Leaf, Lynn Craig, and Foster Friedman. Instead, the charge was violating a no-contact order. No trial. No discovery. No courtroom. That was not a coincidence. That was the strategy.