Assault Allegations Plague a $1.4 Billion Home Eldercare Startup

If you’ve been to an annual open enrollment fair in the past few years, you may have noticed a new eldercare benefit with the unusual name of Papa. Medicare Advantage and Medicaid health plans offer it, as do a number of large employer-sponsored programs. It’s a gig economy version of home assistance, a family-on-demand TaskRabbit for seniors. Customers hire contractors from Papa’s network to come to their homes, hang out and chat, do household chores, chauffeur them to doctor appointments—basically anything shy of the most intimate work done by a traditional caregiver, such as bathing people or helping them use the bathroom. Customers are called “papas,” the contractors “pals.”

Help with shopping was what brought a middle-aged pal named Martin Jermaine Billue Sr. to a 70-year-old woman’s house in Duluth, Minnesota, one morning this winter. Billue arrived at 10 a.m. and drove the woman, who gets around using a walker or power wheelchair, to a few stores. When they returned to her home, she began moving the groceries inside, but he didn’t offer to help. Instead, he changed clothes and surprised her in a bedroom, holding a knife in one hand and his exposed penis in the other. According to the criminal complaint against Billue, he raped her and then demanded she request that he be sent to her home again. Billue has said the sex was consensual and denied the state’s charges of criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping and assault with a dangerous weapon. He’s being held on a $200,000 bond pending trial.