Late Pa. man’s ex-girlfriend may inherit his $1 million retirement account 35 years after they broke up

Jeffrey Rolison died in 2015, months before he was set to retire from his job at Procter & Gamble. But now, a legal battle is playing out over whether his ex-girlfriend will inherit his million-dollar retirement account, 35 years after they broke up.

Rolison, a Bristol native, enrolled in P&G’s employee retirement plan in 1987, naming his then-girlfriend, Margaret Sjostedt, as his only beneficiary on a handwritten form. The couple broke up two years later, but Rolison never changed his beneficiary information, according to court records.

At the time of his death from a heart attack at age 59, Rolison’s retirement account was worth more than $750,000, and has reportedly grown in value since then. His estate, led by his brothers, has been fighting the distribution to Sjostedt, now Margaret Losinger, 68, for nearly a decade, arguing in U.S. District Court that P&G breached its fiduciary duty by not properly informing Rolison of his beneficiary designation on file with the company.

The money, they claim, should go to the estate — not Losinger, whom Rolison “acrimoniously” separated from decades ago, court records say. Estate attorney David Gould said Rolison “would have never kept her in place as beneficiary,” and believed she had been removed.

Neither an attorney for Losinger nor P&G responded to request for comment.

Losinger and Rolison met at Tyler State Park when they were in their 20s, and the couple began dating in 1978, according to court records. After living in Newtown, they moved to Sullivan County, where Rolison had purchased a house.

There, Losinger took up work as a waitress, and, in 1986, Rolison took a job at a nearby P&G plant. A year later, Rolison joined the company’s employee profit-sharing and savings plans, naming Losinger as his beneficiary and “cohabitator,” according to court documents.

The couple split up in 1989, with the estate alleging in court documents that Losinger had been unfaithful. Losinger, meanwhile, said in a 2022 deposition that she wanted marriage and children, but that Rolison was not interested in that path, leading to the split. She would go on to marry in 1990, and later have two children with her husband, who has since died, court documents indicate.

Rolison, meanwhile, began dating another woman, Mary Lou Murray, in 1991. They separated in 2014. Murray was listed as a beneficiary on Rolison’s life insurance for a time, but Rolison removed her from that account following their split, court records indicate. The couple never married, and a federal court ruled in 2021 that Murray could not receive his retirement account money from P&G.

The fact that Rolison changed beneficiaries on other accounts following major life events shows he was “conscientious” about his designations, Gould said. When it comes to the situation with his retirement plan, he added, the fault rests with P&G.

“He would have chosen his family,” Gould said. “He has brothers, nieces, nephews.”

But since Losinger remained on Rolison’s handwritten retirement plan form, she may inherit the account’s funds because of a federal law that requires companies to pay a plan’s last known designated beneficiary. P&G filed a lawsuit in 2017 asking a federal court to determine who should get the money, and in 2020, the court ordered the company to pay Losinger out — a ruling that was reaffirmed in April. But an attorney for Rolison’s estate filed motions for reconsideration, as well as an appeal in the Third Circuit seeking to overturn that ruling, according to court records.

P&G, the estate argues, breached its fiduciary duty to Rolison because its communication about his beneficiary options was inadequate. The messages Rolison received about his accounts, the estate alleges, could have easily been misinterpreted.

One message, for example, indicated that Rolison didn’t “have any beneficiary designations online,” and that “any prior beneficiary designations on file with the plan will be retained by P&G,” according to court documents. P&G’s messaging, Gould said, was far too general.

The company, however, argues that its communications were adequate, and that it regularly provided warnings to account holders when it changed service providers for the plan, which moved to a fully online format in 2015. In her April ruling, U.S. District Judge Karoline Mehalchick wrote that P&G notified Rolison of his beneficiary options on “numerous occasions” from 1989 to 2015, and that Rolison should have known how to change the designation.

“Even with notice and directions how to do so, Rolison never designated a new beneficiary for his P&G investment plan,” Mehalchick wrote. As a result, she added, Losinger is “the rightful, legal beneficiary of the plan’s funds.”

As the legal battle over Rolison’s retirement account continues to play out, its funds remain in escrow and have not yet been distributed.