What’s Behind the Gilded Doors of Aegis Senior Living?

Who Dreams of Owning Elder Care Facilities?

In podcasts, interviews, and on his website, Clark says he bounced around a while as a young adult, studying at Chaminade University in Hawaii and then Gonzaga, before ultimately dropping out. Clark says he then drifted through a series of dead end jobs including a particularly intense-sounding one at the Washington State Penitentiary. “I worked in the criminal justice system at a maximum-security prison in Walla Walla,” he told Seattle Magazine. “I carried a gun and went through Washington station training. I was on a tactical unit that would disrupt people that were taken hostage.”

He told the American Seniors Housing Association that around that time, his sister told him to look into the aging population of America and consider getting into the soon-to-be booming industry of elder care.

Clark interviewed with a business in that field, and after working there a few years, he started Aegis Living with a business partner in 1997.

“Our priority is to build in the most exclusive markets we can, with the highest barriers of entry, so it will be a long time before the competition comes in behind us,” Clark told the Puget Sound Business Journal in 2002. “We want to be in the highest-wealth cities in the US.”

That business model is obvious to everyone around the empire. “It just seems like so much of it is designed to separate people from their life savings,” says Will Brattain, a former certified nursing assistant (CNA) at Aegis Ravenna from July 2022 to February 2024. “You need this, you don’t really know what your options are, this seems like the best bet, and then all of a sudden you’re paying $12,000 a month and there goes your house and there goes everything that you’ve accumulated over the years, your children’s inheritances. It’s all just getting sucked up by Dwayne.”

Violet Lawler, a former employee at top-rated Aegis Greenwood, was in the room for a mandatory presentation from Clark at her workplace in 2023. Afterward when she chatted with him he was polite and seemingly willing to discuss any topic. She was curious about Aegis’ high costs, which are roughly four times the national average for assisted living communities and can climb as high as $30,000 per month for residents and their families depending on the level of care provided.

Violet Lawler says she asked Clark, “Have you ever considered building a community that’s more catered to the middle class?”

Clark’s demeanor quickly changed, she says.

“We looked into it,” he said. “There’s no money in it.”

Then, she says, he walked away.

Neither Clark nor Aegis Living responded to The Stranger’s multiple requests for comment.

The Benevolent Billionaire

In Clark’s many interviews, podcast appearances, and social media posts, the subtext is clear: Trust me, I’ll take good care of your aging family members.

With Seattle’s aging population, more of us will depend on facilities like Clark’s, and it feels good to be told we’ll be in good hands when we can’t take care of ourselves.

But are we? Let’s start at the top, with Clark. Clark presents himself as a bit of a hero, who worked hard, pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and found a way to make a difference in elder care. 

Remember how Clark said when he was younger, he worked at a “maximum-security prison,” “carried a gun,” and would “disrupt people that were taken hostage”? The Department of Corrections has no records of a Dwayne Clark ever working around that time at the Washington State Penitentiary, the only maximum-security prison in Walla Walla. Same for the Walla Walla Police Department. In fact, according to the city of Walla Walla, during that time period, no one named Dwayne Clark worked for the city in any capacity.

He doesn’t hide his wealth: At the Aegis “home office” in Bellevue, Clark displays a motorcycle reportedly once owned by deceased actor Robin Williams. For his annual Christmas party, he lines up his collection of Lamborghinis and Ferraris around the circular driveway at his mansion in Medina. Clark presents himself as the human embodiment of Aegis’ success, showcasing photos on his website with former presidents, billionaire CEO’s, and celebrities.

But he wants you to believe that he gives a great deal of it away to the less fortunate: a benevolent billionaire. One of the good ones.

On his website, Clark writes, “The Clark Family Foundation was founded in 2017 to care for the most vulnerable people in society. Its major focus is on elderly and children.” However, tax forms show the foundation functions primarily as a way for Clark to funnel money to well-funded private schools on the Eastside. The foundation’s most recent tax returns show that in 2023, it only made two donations—$50,000 to Eastside Catholic high school in Sammamish, one of the most expensive high schools in the area; and $200,000 to St Thomas, an elite K-8 school in ritzy Medina—and carried into 2024 nearly $1.5 million dollars of undistributed funding.

Maybe next year they will get to “the most vulnerable people in society.”

His Queen Bee Cafe, formerly a chain with locations in Seattle, now has only one shop in the bougie Clyde Hill neighborhood in Bellevue, where it proudly displays above its front door, “YOU DINE. WE DONATE.” Its website claims, “We are a not-for-profit café. 100% of our proceeds benefit local charities selected each year. So feel good! Because one cup at a time, together we’re making a difference.”

The organization isn’t registered as a non-profit in Washington state, instead functioning as an LLC owned by Aegis. As a not-for-profit, Queen Bee Cafe isn’t required to disclose where they donate their money. But one would assume the organization would be at least somewhat transparent, given such a loud declaration of “YOU DINE. WE DONATE.”

However, Queen Bee Cafe doesn’t make specific information about their donations public, instead offering a list of charities on their website they claim they’ve donated to since the cafe opened. But none of the charities listed on Queen Bee Cafe’s website confirmed ever receiving more than $20,000 in a year from Aegis. A representative from the Greater Seattle Business Association Scholarship Fund—the only organization who would speak on the record about Queen Bee Cafe’s donation history— confirmed that despite being listed on their website, the GSBA hasn’t received any donations from Queen Bee Cafe since 2017. And from 2015 to 2017, they only received a paltry total of $1,767.

Clark’s political donations are some of the only transparent proof of his “charity,” including many donations to conservative candidates like John McCain, Marco Rubio, Dave Reichert, and in 2023 over $13,000 to Nikki Haley. He has personally given $24,000 to American Senior Housing Association, a Political Action Committee that donates to Republican candidates who advocate for the end of Medicare. His most recent donation was in December 2024.

And then there’s The Potato Soup Foundation. Remember the story Clark tells about a lean period growing up when his family ate potato soup for a week? Clark claims during that time his mother told him, “Now I don’t want you to forget, employees have needs just like we’re having this need right now and, you always need to be there for your employees and they’ll always be there for you.”

Let’s just assume we live in a universe where she actually did say that. Clark seems to have taken away a strange lesson. Instead of directing some of the company’s profits toward employees in need, he concluded that workersshould support each other. Employees of Aegis Living can contribute a portion of their paycheck to the Potato Soup Foundation, a charity Clark set up to help Aegis workers who have hit hard times.

“If you can’t eat, we’ll feed you,” Clark told Seattle Business Magazine in 2013. “If someone needs emergency dental surgery and can’t afford it, we’ll pay for it.”

Violet Lawler recalls the company often sharing a story about helping an employee who couldn’t afford to repair her broken-down car. “Why was she not being paid enough to get her car fixed?” Violet asks.

“The general managers say this is a great thing that Dwayne Clark has done, but they never tell us how to apply for it,” says Anthony Ledesma, former lead housekeeper at Aegis Greenwood. “If someone came to me and asked me how to initiate it, I wouldn’t have any way to point them to it.”

Since 2007, tax returns show that Clark’s Potato Soup Foundation received over $1.3 million in donations. Although in interviews, Clark says the foundation is primarily funded by Aegis workers donating a percentage of their paychecks, the website claims it also receives funds “from outside organizations and donors.” Their tax returns don’t list any of these outside organizations or donors. They say that over $1 million in donations to the Potato Soup Foundation have been dispersed, but do not identify where these funds have gone.

We are able to verify one public instance of an Aegis worker who received funds from the Potato Soup Foundation. In March 2021, a care worker named Nick Reyes from Aegis’ Dana Point, CA, location died from COVID-19. Dwayne Clark helped set up a GoFundMe page for the family and even wrote something urging others to donate. In the Potato Soup Foundation’s tax returns, they report that they brought in $20,000 from a fundraising event for the Reyes family. And, sure enough, on the public GoFundMe page, there is a donation from the Clark Family Legacy Foundation to help Reyes’ grieving family: but for only $10,000.

Half of what they claimed they received in donations.

The Line Workers

Many current and former Aegis employees expressed concerns with the inconsistencies in the way Clark represents himself, but over and over again they said the most offensive claim was that he values his employees.

Despite Aegis making nearly $250 million per year in annual revenue, very little trickles down to the “line workers” (as they’re called at Aegis) who directly interact with the senior citizens in Aegis’ self-described “luxury communities.” Although Clark claims they pay industry-standard rates or better, caregivers, kitchen workers, and housekeepers are hired at barely above minimum wage, typically no more than $20 per hour. One of Aegis’ main competitors, Horizon House, is a similarly luxury private-pay assisted living community. Their union contract with SEIU 775 starts workers with no experience at $24 per hour. A representative from SEIU 775 says that ⅓ of workers start higher than that.

The living wage in King County is $30.82.

In a Facebook post in 2022, Clark reflected on his rise to success from making just $6 per hour at age 16 working the “wheat fields and pea fields of Walla Walla.” According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, $6 in 1974 is worth over $40 today—two times as much as he pays his line workers.

SEIU 775, the union who represents the workers at Aegis Ravenna, has been trying to negotiate a fair contract with Aegis for nearly two years now. Aegis is reportedly offering only pennies in compromise. According to someone familiar with the talks, the union is asking for more staffing and training to meet their elderly residents’ needs, as well as an additional $2-4 per hour for employees to match other competitive assisted living communities.

Will Brattain, the former certified nursing assistant (CNA) at Aegis Ravenna from 2022 to 2024, says, “I was hired at $22 an hour and I was the highest-paid CNA in the building.”

A former HR employee who worked at Aegis from 2021 to 2024 says if a candidate ever requested over $22 per hour, they had to get approval from their boss. “Rarely was it ever approved,” they say. “And in HR, you get what you pay for.”

And it doesn’t appear to improve from there for the folks helping the residents. Violet Lawler says she started at Aegis in 2019 making $18 per hour as a life enrichment assistant, running activities for the residents. Over the years she was able to get marginal raises, but it wasn’t easy.

“I was at $19 per hour when I learned that two male LEA’s (life enrichment assistants) with no prior experience had just been hired at $21 per hour. I called Aegis out on it and they bumped me up to the same rate,” she said.

Eventually she made it up to $23 per hour. Then she hit a ceiling.

Lawler says after working for Aegis for almost five years, including moving over to help them open their new Aegis Greenwood facility in 2022, and receiving positive performance reviews, at her annual performance meeting in January 2024 she was only offered a raise of 92 cents an hour.

”There was no explanation for why,” Lawler says. “And 92 cents is just insulting. It did not cover the cost-of-living increase. So when you look at it that way, you’re almost making less money this year than you did last year.”

Clark frequently claims employee turnover in the senior care sector is as high as 200%, and that at Aegis that figure is closer to 20 to 50 percent. Neither appear to be true. According to Seniorly, turnover for senior care facilities averaged 52.1% in 2024.

As for that 20 to 50 percent turnover at Aegis claim? Workers tell a different story.

“For sure, that’s an inaccurate statement,” said Anthony Ledesma to The Stranger in December 2024 when he was the lead housekeeper at Aegis Greenwood (he’s since left). “Especially with caregivers, the turnover rate is crazy. A lot of the caregivers that I knew when I started are gone now.” Anthony was hired only a year earlier, in December 2023.

Violet Lawler says after helping open the Greenwood location in 2022, she estimates of her roughly 40 original co-workers across five departments, only two were still employed there two years later.

The data seems to agree.

During their contract bargaining, Aegis shared headcount data with SEIU 775, the union representing the workers at Aegis Ravenna. A report from January 2024 shows that in 2023, turnover at that location was 92.1%. A June 2024 report shows that turnover for that year was already at 56.1% only halfway through the year. Then, according to Megan Parke from SEIU 775, Aegis stopped responding to information requests.

“A lot of people were leaving and taking jobs at Dick’s or other fast food restaurants because they’re more money, less stress, and less responsibility,” a former HR employee who left the company in 2024 says.

Low pay isn’t all that’s driving workers away from Aegis. In a class-action lawsuit in 2018, over 10,000 former employees in Washington and California alleged, in part, that Aegis was violating elder financial abuse and consumer protection laws by deliberately understaffing their facilities. One worker also claimed they were paid $5.82 per hour when their contract was for $17 per hour.

(The sanitized version that was reported in the press on sites like McKnight’s Senior Living claimed the suit merely alleged the company made “staffing decisions were based on budgets rather than resident care needs.”)

“The core of our mission and culture is to provide the highest level of care for our residents. From the beginning, we have fervently disputed the allegations in this case,” Aegis Living General Counsel Elizabeth Chambers told McKnight’s Senior Living. “After several years of aggressively litigating, we made the decision to stop fighting, collaborate with the plaintiff’s attorneys, and put an end to this case so we can continue focusing our full attention on what matters most —  our residents, their families and our team.”

The company agreed to settle the lawsuit in 2021 by paying the plaintiffs $16.25 million.

A complaint filed with the Seattle Office of Labor Standards (OLS) shows a pattern of wage discrepancy. A former employee at the Madison location from November 2021 to January 2022 alleged she was hired at a rate of $17.50 per hour but paid at the rate of $17.25 for months. She was also allegedly promised a typical morning-afternoon shift then after hiring, was instructed to work the opening shift starting at 5:30 am. At that time, the worker says, Aegis’ payroll system went down and she began receiving odd amounts of money through physical checks and direct deposits with no formal accounting of her hours or Paid Sick and Safe Time. When she requested the terms she originally agreed to, and for formal pay stubs, she says she was ignored. When she walked out, she was fired.

A second complaint with the OLS in 2021 alleged that Aegis refused to pay a worker’s Paid Sick and Safe Time, and neglected on five separate occasions to pay him overtime rates on short notice.

Both workers found employment elsewhere, and OLS referred them to Washington State Labor & Industries to file a claim.

Understaffing is a widespread issue as well, according to workers. Gurnesh Chetty, a medical technician at Aegis Ravenna since April 2021, says, “We’re always understaffed. Then when staff asks management for help, the response we always get is, ‘We don’t have the budget to hire more staff.’ But they have the budget to open a new location every month.”

“It’s low pay,” Violet Lawler says. “Everybody is getting run into the ground. Everybody is just absolutely worked to the bone. We care so much about the job that we kind of put up with it for longer than we should. The burnout level is so incredibly high.”

“Tired people make mistakes, and mistakes cause accidents. Those accidents can be life or death,” Will Brattain says.

Fed up with these conditions, the staff at Aegis’ Ravenna location started organizing in late 2022. Once word got to corporate, instead of meeting with their workers to figure out solutions, the company went into protection mode. They’d already been fined $53,451 by the National Labor Relations Board for anti-worker surveillance and retaliation, but now—with the help of notorious union-busting firm Morgan Lewis—they ramped it up even further.

In a closed-door meeting, those with direct knowledge say Clark gave executives specific marching orders: no union sympathizers.

Jeri Leasure, former head of recruiting at Aegis, says that in the summer of 2022, “Dwayne had what he called a ‘fireside chat’ at the home office, where he invited all the GMs from all of his communities to come to the home office and lectured them about how they needed to scrub social media, they needed to scrub the resumes, they needed to make sure no one was affiliated with a union.”

She says shortly after, she interviewed a cook for an open job at Aegis’ Lake Union location. Then, she says, she got a call from the regional culinary services director. “She goes, ‘Not only no, but hell no. He used to work at Lumen Field, and they’re all union,’” Jeri says she was told.

SEIU 775 has filed 47 Unfair Labor Practice charges against Aegis with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging illegal surveillance and retaliation, among other charges. In one outrageous case, the general manager at Aegis Greenwood allegedly saw one of their workers speaking to SEIU representatives on her lunch break off of company grounds. So they fired her at the end of the day.

Former colleagues allege that Dwayne J. Clark also perceived that this new union push was caused by college-educated workers infiltrating their workforce. So the solution, according to multiple former HR employees, was to reject candidates with college degrees or even just resumes that looked “too polished.” One HR employee says they were told their ideal candidate was “dumb enough, but good enough for the job.”

In May 2024, when Aegis opened their new 48,000-square-foot Laurelhurst building across from the University of Washington, the company put on a job fair but recruiters were instructed to not hire any UW students.

“‘We’re not going to hire anybody that’s going to UW or any colleges because they study unions,’” Jeri says she was told by her boss, the Vice President of Talent. “The recruiter running that job fair came up to me and she was like, ‘How the hell am I not going to hire any students?’”

Jeri told the recruiter to go ask the new Vice President of Talent.

“Make all the shifts 8-to-5, and they need to be available seven days a week,” she was told by the Vice President of Talent. “That’s how you will deter any student.”

In the summer of 2024, workers at the corporate office raised concerns not only about these anti-union hiring practices, but also alleged discrimination in the workplace. After this new VP of Talent was hired that spring, positions that brought in hundreds of applicants only resulted in interviews for one profile of candidate: white women in their 20’s.

Jeri said she felt her new boss was hiring younger recruiters around her to push her out. She is a single mother and her teenage son—who also worked at Aegis—was just in a life-threatening car accident. She desperately needed to keep her job.

Jeri went to one of her other bosses to raise these concerns. “Listen, the discrimination has to stop,” Jeri says she told her boss. “It’s the union. It’s race. It’s age.”

“No, no, no. I don’t think that’s what she’s doing,” Jeri says she was told by her boss.

A week later, Aegis fired Jeri. Her son, too.

The Trickle-Down Effect

Most concerning is the effects these management practices are having on Aegis Living’s clients: vulnerable elderly people in need of protective care.

“They are a profoundly corrupt organization,” says an Issaquah man named David Pollock whose mother and father lived at Aegis of Bellevue. “There isn’t just fire where there’s smoke. It’s a forest fire.”

In 2014, Pollock and his family received an email from Aegis informing them that care for their elderly father needed to be ramped up from 8-10 hours per day to 24/7 care, with a hefty price increase to $6,000 per week. The family was concerned about the cost and wanted to make sure he was getting qualified help, so they asked if they could vet and hire outside help to come in and help their father. But after the company “very strongly objected,” the family reluctantly agreed to pay to ramp up his care at Aegis.

But just to be sure, the Pollock family installed a camera in their father’s room. What Pollock reports he saw was appalling. When he would visit his father, “he would have a thick beard and was dressed in his same clothes day after day.” According to a lawsuit they later filed against Aegis, not only did the video footage show their father was not receiving the round-the-clock care they were now paying for, but he was being ignored while covered in his own urine and feces, kept awake by workers loudly talking and watching television in his room, and left alone without food or help getting outside for fresh air.

He complained to two care team members as well as the general manager of the building. But Pollock says they were more worried about the camera in the room, which they confiscated and refused to return, than addressing his concerns about his father’s care.

His father allegedly lost 24 pounds in January 2014 and another 15 in Februarybefore the family removed him from the Aegis facility. “He’s going to die today!” Pollock says one of the Aegis workers told him as they wheeled his elderly father out. “You need to take him to the hospital.”

Pollock did take his father to the hospital, and after several weeks there he improved. In a chilling moment, Pollock says his father told him that he had no memory of his previous six months living at Aegis. The family then moved their father to a family care facility, a more intimate six-person complex that was 20 percent cheaper than Aegis, they say, and he lived there happily for almost another year until dying from an accidental slip and fall.

When Pollock and his family sued Aegis, the company fought the lawsuit on the technicality that since Washington state is a two-direction recording state, meaning both parties must consent, the video was inadmissible in court. Aegis sent Pollock a letter that they would sue the Pollocks for any losses incurred in the lawsuit unless they dropped it. So the Pollocks did.

But in that letter from Aegis, the company split a curious hair. They claimed they didn’t have any liability in the case at all because the workers identified in the complaint weren’t technically employees of Aegis, but third-party contractors. How could that be true? Pollock wondered.

A former member of Aegis’ HR team confirms that as recently as 2024, many workers in Aegis buildings are actually provided by a third-party staffing agency.

“The staffing agencies don’t have to follow the same regulations that we do,” said a former HR employee in late 2024. “I had employees that were coming from the agency that didn’t have work authorization, you know, green cards or papers.”

What was their primary consideration when considering third-party contractors? I asked.

They said simply: “Cost.”

In that class-action lawsuit from 2018, a plaintiff claimed that their family member, a resident who was paying $6,235 a month at Aegis Bellevue, was also dangerously neglected during her time at Aegis. The lawsuit alleged that on numerous occasions, “Ms. Shanahan’s family members found her unattended on the floor tangled in her bedding. She had sustained numerous unattended falls at Aegis, resulting in lacerations and bruises throughout her body.”

In 2022, a caregiver at Aegis Shoreline raped two elderly women with Alzheimer’s. (The suspect pled guilty in January.) Because the two victims suffer from Alzheimer’s and cognitive issues, their claims at first were not escalated by family and staff. Then, two days after the reports were finally sent to the state, one of the victims pointed at one of the workers in the hallway and identified him as the man who raped her. Lauren Ragen, a daughter of one of the victims, told KUOW last year, “I can only imagine how many situations like this have occurred that were swept under the rug, because the victim’s experience wasn’t a trusted source. So much has been taken from them already. We must take care of them.”

In support of SB 5337, a new law establishing certification standards for memory care providers, 9 people testified to their experience with Aegis.

“My dad’s time at Aegis Living and Life Care of Kirkland was a nightmare,” said Ginger Jackson of Issaquah. “He needed help with transfers, but at Aegis he didn’t have a functioning call button.They kept saying they would fix it, or that they had already fixed it, but they hadn’t. Understaffing is a huge issue. The care staff aren’t given the resources to do their jobs properly, they are stretched too thin, overworked and underpaid. Some of the most vulnerable people in our communities are in assisted living facilities. They need and deserve to be safe and cared for.”

Jennifer Furch of Woodinville said, “The staffing ratio at Aegis Marymoor was inadequate, leaving residents without the attention and support they needed. Care staff, overburdened and undertrained, were unable to consistently deliver the services outlined in residents’ care plans. Documentation of care was alarmingly absent, relying solely on verbal communication at shift change, which led to errors and lapses in care. Most troubling, staff were not trained to effectively communicate with residents who have dementia, leaving vulnerable individuals like my mother without the understanding and dignity they deserve.”

Since September 2021, Aegis Living facilities have been reported to the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services 333 times, resulting in eight different fines for violations including not administering medications on time and potentially exposing residents to life-threatening diseases.

In the past three years alone, residents and their families have filed 94 complaints to the Washington State Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, a federal organization that advocates for residents in assisted living facilities. Some of the complaints alleged “abuse, gross neglect, and exploitation.”

Patricia Hunter, the Washington State Ombuds since 2011, says in the long-term care industry, the number of complaints against Aegis aren’t that far out of the norm. But for a luxury facility, they’re surprising. “I think the expectations [of residents at Aegis] are really high. But at that cost, why wouldn’t they be?” she says.

Considering the huge price tag of Aegis facilities alongside these allegations of low pay, understaffing, and substandard care, Hunter says, “It sounds like a grift.”

But none of these issues seem to be affecting Aegis’ bottom line. They’re preparing to break ground on two new senior housing facilities in Woodinville and Sammamish.

And the accolades keep rolling in.

One might wonder how Aegis Greenwood, home of the 92-cent raise, was recently named the best senior living facility in the country by Seniorly. It appears to be a byproduct of silence. Their website says, “To qualify for the Awards, communities must be in the top five percent of our consumer sentiment ratings, be free of serious licensing violations for the last 36 months and have no evidence of negative media coverage for the last 24 months.”

That’s not all: McKnight’s Senior Living just named Clark their Pinnacle Awards Career Achievement Award winner for 2025. “Dwayne Clark generously shares the thinking behind his bold moves with others to move the sector forward, but he also leads by example — and what an example,” McKnight’s Editorial Director, Vice President, and Associate Publisher John O’Connor said in the announcement.

The award-winner recently outlined his 2025 plans for Aegis for Senior Housing News. In his interview, he said he’s looking into artificial intelligence and offshoring jobs to reduce some of Aegis’ operations costs.

“It’s funny to me, the way [Clark] describes his upbringing, the way that he describes his grandmother. His grandmother would not have been able to afford to live at Aegis,” says Will Brattain.

Would she even want to? Would you?

“As someone that’s worked in that industry, I worry about what will happen when I get too old to take care of myself,” Will says. “I’ve worked at a nursing home, I’ve worked at Aegis assisted living, I’ve worked in independent care…and I can safely say that I would never put my aging relatives in Aegis Living.”