* “Betty Jennings” is a pseudonym applied by Renters Welcome.
Read “Meet Betty Jennings Part I” here
The pandemic brought to the forefront a wide variety of weaknesses with our existing processes in all sectors of our economy, but it is through the shifts in the Justice System that Betty Jennings had the floor dropped out beneath her–all because she refused to submit what she viewed as a fraudulent document with a government agency in September, 2021.
“I know the risks of paying rent in cash, but for me it is a straight-forward way to tell whether or not a landlord is trustworthy or not. For the first months of the arrangement, I was given receipts for my payments within 72 hours, which is the way it was supposed to go.”
“After the State of Illinois declined my application in August, I decided to present the landlord with two options. Let’s either end the lease agreement and I would move out by October 31st or if he wanted to keep me as a tenant through the wintertime, then he would have to at least insulate the attic space since I was losing hundreds of dollars a month in both heating and electric bills. I put in the envelop $400.00 with the idea that if he wanted to keep me, the cash would help pay for the insulation and if he wanted me to go, it was a sign I was committed to the debt.”
“The day I gave him the letter, I explained what my two thoughts were along with asking for a receipt. I was told I would get one and I assumed it would be like in the past. However, the landlord was not outside very often, which is how we usually connected for conversations, and he kept reassuring me I would get one.”
“After his third refusal to issue me a receipt by telling me he would get one to me, my gut instincts began rumbling around that something just wasn’t ‘right’ about the relationship and I began searching for apartments. I decided my best decision for all parties was to move as soon as possible, allowing for both space and time to sort through what was going to happen with the rent I thought I owed at that time.”
Jennings would spend one or two hours a day combing through ads and even answered a few, but was declined on all of them. “I knew my credit wasn’t the greatest to begin with as I was finishing up bringing my utilities up to date after a year of having to sometimes wait until the last moment before making a payment on a bill, so that likely helped guide the choice to reject my application.”
On October 5th, Jennings received the loudest and clearest signal from her landlord that something was seriously wrong with the state of the tenant/landlord relationship. “The landlord hurried across the street with some papers in his hand. One is a flyer from the County announcing another round of rental assistance being offered, which he gives me first. For a few heartbeats, I am intrigued but demoralized due to the decline of the State, but it was the new 5 day notice he gave me that gave me reason to shut down any thoughts of a peaceful reconciliation of what I still viewed as money owed him.”
When Jennings had submitted paperwork to the County in 2020 and the State in 2021, she had sent in the first 5 day notice she had been given, which accurately reflected the 2 months rent she was behind, along with the other documents requested by the program. “The application process itself was quite basic and with my application with the County in 2020, the landlord did not submit any paperwork after I initiated the process, so I was declined. With the State application, I used the same 5 day notice to calculate my past due and it at least appears that the landlord submitted his paperwork. But due to the verbiage of the decline letter from the State, they don’t give you any material fact of why you were decline by being overly generic, so I could have been decline because he never submitted paperwork as he claimed.”
All of these micro details and so many more began to overwhelm Jennings when she looked at the second piece of paper she was being given, which was a new 5 day notice reflecting the amount owed of $16,100.
“The moment I saw the number, I knew the landlord was not only willing to steal my money, but also demand of me to lie to the government to get even more money that he had not theoretically earned up to that point. If I was to file that document without the reflection of the $400.00, not only would I be defrauding the government, I would equally be allowing the landlord to outright steal the $400.00 by telling anyone who would listen how crazy I was for suggesting I owed him anything less than what he documented on an official document.”
“I knew I had to get away from the situation, so I politely asked him was why the document didn’t reflect the $400.00 cash payment. I swallowed my tongue when he looked me in the eyes and told me he was considering a payment ‘in escrow’ and basically said, ‘oh. Okay.’ and then we parted ways.”
“Once I was in the apartment, it didn’t take long for the first wave of emotion to hit me that he not only successfully stole my money at this point, but his insisting I file the notice he gave me as well. I was so disappointed in myself for trusting him and having faith he would act in good faith for the entire business relationship and my fear only amplified the disappointment. I was faced with the literal dare by a former public official to call him a liar and a thief in any capacity, which is exactly what I realized had just happened. Under most circumstances, if someone has $400.00 stolen from them, they can simply file a police report for the theft and go from there.”
“However, when money is stolen through a lease agreement, it is not considered a criminal matter, rather it is treated as a civil matter. I knew I needed to take steps to ensure I would at least have the chance to go through the courts if this situation turned into an eviction situation, because the landlord made it clear he not only didn’t want me as a tenant, he would retaliate and bully every step of the way that he could get away with.”
Jennings went ahead and did things like creating a Statement of Denial of Debt and having it notarized, as well as gathering public information from sources like the county tax portal and the recorder of deeds office.
“Because there was information in those public records creating confusion as to who actually owned the building and because the building allegedly was in a land trust, I decided to FOIA request all documents the City had on the building she was living in, including all inspection reports and Certificates of Occupancy.”
While Jennings was well-versed in this type of research, she also considered herself retired from such activities beginning with the day when she first moved in. “The landlord knew I was done with involving myself with local political issues and that my goal, pre-pandemic at least, was to go to work every day and spend an evening or two at a local club with live music and that’s about it. This was a brutal part of my being disappointed with myself. He took advantage of so many truths I chose to share with him and had the pandemic not happened, I would not have had reason to discover what actually was going on with my apartment.”
“There were no records of the landlord ever securing a Certificate of Occupancy for years and that was an extremely bitter pill to swallow. I lost everything to a house fire a few decades earlier because the property owner decided to take short cuts and ignore the law when it came to electrical work, so to know that the landlord had outright lied to me prior to my signing the lease that the apartment had passed inspection was just heart-breaking. This was a person who held a public persona of being a watchdog for corruption and waste, but apparently his contempt for government and the rule of law was a habit and not a one-off.”
“While all of this is washing over me, I come across an pre-sale inspection report from years earlier and began scanning the stats of the building. I was not prepared to discover that at the time of the inspection, there was only one gas meter. This opened the door for the possibility I had been paying the gas bill for the entire building the entire time, which would be a different kind of theft than the refusal to issue me a receipt for the cash I gave him. It would at least explain some of why my gas bills were always so high, but not entirely. It just was another cut in the fabric of our relationship, which was already pretty shredded and just made me more determined to not only move out, but to figure out how to calculate how much money I owed him. I was also starting to ask myself if I owed him anything at all.”
She began recalling all sorts of details that she should have interpreted as signals but had missed or dismissed and after a little more research and quite a few phone calls, it eventually occurred to her that she had been illegally living at that address since the moment she took the keys from the landlord and that she was not a tenant, but a squatter.
“It truly crushed me when I realized I was going to have to admit to the world that I was illegally living there if I was to have any chance of not only leaving the properly without an eviction on my record, but any other legal actions by the landlord to assign a debt to me that I no longer believed existed. Once I worked through this realization to the point of grudgingly acceptance, I began approaching the circumstance from a stance of the landlord owing me a full refund for intentionally defrauding me into signing the document and a whole new set of possibilities began revealing themselves.”
But eventually it wasn’t a refund she thought she should pursue, rather criminal charges for his posing as a landlord and thus stealing the payments she made prior to the pandemic, which is a felony in the state she was living in.
“As I was research consumer laws, I came across a state statute that made it illegal for someone to pose as a landlord and then take money from someone. I worked hard to poke holes into the idea that since there was no valid Certificate of Occupancy on file with the City, no one had the legal right to use the apartment for housing purposes even if no rent was actually paid, but the more I challenged it, the more confident I felt in having found the right words to explain at least a portion of what I believed was going on between us.”
But Jennings didn’t stop with considering this person someone who had been posing as a landlord and eventually she was able to recognize the bigger picture to be theft through extortion, coercion and blackmail attempts, including his filing for an eviction with yet another false number, this time alleging she owed $17,100.
“This is where everything gets really, really sloppy with my situation. This person deceived me into signing a lease which creates the extortion, coercion and blackmail environment available to any property owner. I understand that if I don’t pay my rent, I am under threat of having an eviction complaint filed against me, the kiss of death for most renters, which makes this situation all the more disturbing as to just how easy it is for a property owner to skirt the laws governing an owner’s accountability to the marketplace to comply with all levels of laws, including local laws and then drag a renter to court for money they don’t deserve because they never properly licensed the apartment unit for occupancy in the first place.”
“The extortion is the money surrendered under the guise of a rental payment, of which the disguise is not applied by me, but by the fraud that led me to believe I owed the money to this person. The coercion part is the money I surrendered paying the utility bills for an apartment unit I had no legal right to be in so that he could avoid paying the utilities he was otherwise accountable for even without a Certificate of Occupancy in place.”
Despite being quite comfortable with her new conclusions based on all of the new information she had gathered, she decided to hold off any hard pursuit of criminal charges against the landlord. Instead, she began focusing on the eviction notice she was delivered by the county Sheriff in late November 2021 and exploring how she could successfully challenge the amount and thus having the case dismissed and maybe even perjury charges being applied.
“I found myself initially considering myself lucky the eviction complaint had the 5 day notice asking for the $16,100 through October 1, 2021 with the claim of money due from March 1, 2020 through October 15, 2021 being the $17,100. But I began realizing just how tangled of a web he was in the process of creating for himself because whoever was responsible for completing the complaint failed miserably at properly completing it.”
“By the time my court date came up on December 14, 2021, I was fully ready and prepared to ask for an immediate dismissal due to a list of failures on the form, took the afternoon off work and was at the courthouse over an hour early due to public transportation schedules. There was no way I was going to miss this court date, nor was I going to take a chance of a technology failure causing a default judgment to be filed against me.”
“I was really becoming aware of just how reduced our justice system had become with all of these court cases being heard through Zoom. While waiting in the Zoom room before the call time, one woman was frustrated when it was explained she would not be able to directly submit her documents to the judge and I too, shared a measure of her disappointment. While it was explained we could hold the documents up to the camera, I was worried the verbiage on my documents would be unreadable, but I was still all-in on getting this matter before the judge.”
“Turns out that while I was 15 minutes early to the 2:00 call, some people had already been waiting hours, an option that might not have otherwise been available if we had actually been required to show up in the courtroom. The courts had established through General Order that approximately 90 eviction cases would be heard two days a week and according to the woman managing the Zoom room on the computer we would be using, apparently all 90 cases were to be presented that day.”
“We all could hear what was going on in the Zoom room online and the clerk was doing what they could to keep order with the chaos that was created by the judge being late. People not knowing how to turn their microphones on an off was a big part of it, but after 30 minutes or so, I could understand why some people were speaking up online about what was taking so long to get court started even though the procedural person in me was cringing slightly. I didn’t want to judge the judge harshly for his delay and knowing we likely would never be told the reason, I decided to assume it was for the right reasons and committed to waiting patiently for my turn in front of the judge.”
By 4:00, the courthouse had significantly quieted down and people were beginning to wrap things up in preparation for the building to be closed to the public by 4:30 p.m. But on this day, there was extra activity going on both outside and inside the courthouse Zoom room. It turned out that there was scheduled floor maintenance that was supposed to begin at 4:30 p.m. and when 4:30 p.m. came and went without Jennings and another person being called in front of the judge, things became a little more uncomfortable for her.
“There was a bustling of activity coming from people entering and leaving the room in connection with what was to be a stripping of the floors and by 4:30, their equipment was still sitting outside the room and the staff dropped down to three, then two. The person who had been there with us the whole time and two other people. Eventually, the woman who had monitored the Zoom room online since we had arrived went home and the two staffers who were still there began making phone calls to explain why myself and another person needed to have our cases called before the judge as soon as possible.”
“5:00 p.m. hits and still nothing. The other defendant and I begin chatting a bit about our the circumstance of still being in the building and then about 10 minutes later, my case is called.”
“I get up and stand in front of the camera where I can see the judge and he can see me. At this point, I know I have a shot at winning a default dismissal if the landlord and his lawyer are not at court while having an equal chance of winning a dismissal should I get the chance to say out loud everything I found wrong with the complaint. I had mixed emotions as to which one I had a preference for, as all I cared about was having this particular complaint dismissed, so when the judge turned to someone and started asking if either of them were there, I was a little anxious and in some ways disappointed. It was looking like they weren’t there, which meant I would not get a chance to have my voice heard about all of the errors in the complaint. But within a short amount of time, the judge turned to me and told me that since neither party was present, the case was then dismissed. I asked the judge for clarity in my understanding the landlord would have to start the whole process over from scratch and he affirmed my understanding. I thanked the judge and then walked back to my seat without much emotion.”
“There was no need to celebrate the verdict, as it did not actually resolve the already-hostile environment and if anything, created a greater possibility for an illegal lock-out to occur for retaliation purposes. Even though he would be penalized for the act, the irreversible damages he would be able to create by preventing me from accessing my property, let alone any destruction of property was still quite intimidating and likely to be ever-present until I moved.”
“Many people don’t understand that when a tenant wins against a property owner who filed a complaint, the tenant is at greater risk of an act of desperation being performed by the property owner, including repeated filings of eviction complaints every time rent is even 1 hour overdue, illegal lock-outs, other tenants in the building creating additional tension, etc. It’s not a victory in the name of peace. It’s a public piece of victory over another person in a court of law over a matter of character and credibility as it relates to what is typically classified as a civil matter, not a criminal one.”
“Also, despite the dismissal, the complaint was still picked up by various data collection algorithms and manual searches performed by attorney’s and tenant’s rights advocates, let alone collections agencies and the Internet in general, so again, the damage was already done and this was just a matter of creating one ‘mission failure’ to put a pause on the continued retaliation by the landlord and eventually the attorney he chose.”
Once she received the dismissal, she went back to spending an hour or two a day looking for a place to live. She tended to spread out her search time to various times during the day with the hopes of catching new ads soon after they were placed.
“I’m not even going to get started on the failures of these various apartment listing sites other than mentioning they are virtually worthless to any renter in terms of credibility, especially when they imply they have ‘verified’ an advertiser. These ‘verifications’ do not include a demand of proof of right to advertise the property in any form, such as with a Certificate of Occupancy and instead do everything they can to collect your data throughout their process and pass it through all of their 3rd and 4th party systems while providing ‘services’ to the landlord and the renter to make their lives ‘easier’.”
After all of the time Jennings lost to working on defending herself from an accusation she knew to be false, she spent the next few weeks a little more at ease in terms of having the dismissal to share with other potential landlords despite her squatter status, but this ease was short lived.
In early January, Jennings received an email from the attorney stating that he had secured an Order of Possession on January 4, 2022 of which the eviction was stayed until January 11th.
She quickly responded via email demanding to know why he would lie about such a thing since she knew what happened that day in court and had been given a dismissal, not a judgment against her and certainly no continuance to any other date.
He then requested a copy of the dismissal order given to her, which led her to head to the courthouse to find out exactly what had been filed that day.
The document she was given had her heart pounding because according to the records in the database system, it said that on December 14, 2021, the judge approved a trial date in January, just as the attorney had claimed in the email.
In other words, the system was telling all who had access that the landlord had a legal right to involve the county sheriff in an eviction proceeding the judge did not approve, even though it appears as if he signed off on it due to the stamp used on the signature line.
In other words, Betty Jennings was now facing a new threat and it wasn’t just the possibility of a Sheriff showing up to evict her in a short amount of time, but she was far more afraid of what would happen when she called the police to report an illegal lock-out in process should she fail to correct every record in every database the information was submitted to within the justice system.
Part III of the Betty Jennings Story coming soon!
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