What exactly do you want to sue your landlord for? You are quite naturally being evicted since you haven’t paid rent for year, and you think that you can use a true statement about your actions posted by someone other than your landlord as a defense to avoid eviction, or even to sue your landlord?! Yeah, no, that’s not going to happen.
First of all, the fact that you are even considered trying to avoid eviction is abhorrent to me. This would be disgusting no matter who you were victimizing, but you’ve also posted that your landlord is trying to move in with you because it’s his only property and he has nowhere else to go, so this is one of the more egregious cases of someone abusing the eviction moratorium. You have not paid rent for year, and there is absolutely no excuse for that. Sure, we might be in the midst of a pandemic, but you could have used some of the generous unemployment benefits and your stimulus check to either pay rent or at the very least remove yourself from a property that doesn’t belong to you. I know, you might have had to downsize significantly, live in shared housing, or even move to another area with cheaper housing that you could afford on you unemployment benefits, but that’s life. Either you are employed where you live and you can therefore pay rent, or you have no job tying you to this location which means that you can go to the backwoods of Nebraska and rent a bedroom in a trailer for $200 a month. Is it what you want? No, but that doesn’t matter anymore, not when it is all that you can afford.
That’s not how hard you asked, I know. You were wondering if you could use the truthful statement posted about you to work your way out of this predicament, and no, of course you cannot do that. Your landlord has ways to evict you in spite of the moratorium, some legal and some that are less-than-legal, and the courts have already indicated that they will not support any further extension as they can no longer be considered temporary emergency measures. Besides, you were only protected in the first place because the government feared that a huge number of homeless people would spread the coronavirus even more rapidly through society, so now that vaccination campaigns have begun you’re running out of time to use COVID as an excuse. I know, it’s become the new “the dog ate my homework” excuse that all deadbeats across America are using to worm their way out of taking responsibility for anything, but that excuse will lose effectiveness in inverse proportion to the number of vaccines administered.
You’re going to have to leave your free housing very soon, so the only question that remains is how badly you want to fuck up your future to stay a few more weeks. Do you want to insist on claiming protection under the moratorium and have your landlord question your sworn statement in court, so he can evict and ask the court to sentence you to jail time if you weren’t 100 percent honest? You already owe your landlord tens of thousands of dollars, because the moratorium hasn’t erased your debt, and since I’m guessing you aren’t going to pay voluntarily, he’ll have to sue you and get a judgment so he can garnish your wages and seize any money or assets you may have now or in the future. This will follow you around for the rest of your life, making it impossible for you to get credit or even own anything of value, so you might want to try to avoid being formally evicted as well – and you really don’t want that felony charge from perjury! If you leave now, before your landlord can evict you, you won’t have an eviction on your record. That’s good, since it was all but impossible to find a landlord willing to rent to you once you’d been evicted before the pandemic, and now it’s actually become impossible. If you leave now, the statement you handed in won’t be examined in court, so you won’t be arrrsted and charged for lying on it. Hell, if you agree to leave immediately, your landlord might even be willing to knock off part of your debt or give you a payment plan!
You have no other choice, because legally you don’t have a leg to stand on, and you’re only hanging on by thread in the form of an expiring moratorium that you’re not even truly eligible for. Even if you had some cause to sue your landlord, it would not protect you from eviction unless his wrongdoing formed the basis for his attempt to evict you. Even if your landlord was guilty of all kinds of misdeeds against you, it would not excuse you for your own bad behavior. You are going to be evicted for nonpayment (unless your landlord decides to get creative with the cause to speed things along), so the only possible defense here is to prove that you did pay. In a hypothetical scenario where you could successfully sue your landlord for slander or libel, it would only get you whatever you were awarded for the damages it caused you. You would not get to also continue to live rent free in his property, and he wouldn’t lose his right to get that property back from you.
This really is all hypothetical, because you don’t have any valid reason to sue your landlord. His friend posted your picture and your name online, and that is neither against any criminal or civil law. In addition to identifying you, thin same friend also made the statement that you had not paid rent in a year. Had that been a lie that this friend wrote knowingly and with the intent to harm your reputation or prospects, you might have had a theoretical case for defamation. You’d need to be able to prove all those aspects though, and then you’d have to show that this lie had somehow damaged you or your prospects. If it just sat on a website somewhere and you never experienced any consequences, it would be pointless to sue as you would not be eligible for any money. So you see, when all that actually happened in your case was that a friend of your landlord identified you online and made the truthful statement that you hadn’t paid rent in a year, there was no defamation, libel, slander, or any other cause to sue. Legally speaking, neither your landlord nor his friend did anything wrong, and you weren’t wronged.
You have refused to pay rent or even to move out of the apartment you aren’t paying for, and that is morally no different than theft. You have driven your landlord into homelessness while you sit nice and warm in the home he worked hard to obtain, and now you wanted to sue him because his friend told the world whet you did. Karma will continue to find you, and the eviction, lawsuits, debt, and possible criminal conviction that will attach to you if you don’t stop this now will stay with you for life. You obviously don’t care about your landlord, but if don’t want to spend some time in jail before you then settle into the weekly-rental roach motel that will be your home from now on, go ahead and apologize to your landlord. Clean the place really well, vacate this weekend, sell your valuables and hand your landlord the cash along with the keys, and then apologize and agree you whatever payment plan he offers you.
My son was a straight A student at 14 when he came home with an F in math one day. I told him not to worry, that I was proud of him, and I loved him no matter what grade he came home with. I explained that a grade does not define what kind of person he was, how smart he was, or how good he was.
On the back of his paper I then drew a scale from one to ten and I asked him to show me on the scale about where his score was. He pointed to the six. I then asked him how that grade made him feel. He pointed off the scale where the negative three might be. I then asked him if he understood how out of proportion the grade was to how it made him feel, and that becoming overly anxious wasn’t in proportion to the grade.
I explained to him that my love and confidence in him was unconditional and I was there for him to work together through any obstacle he encountered. That said, I let him know that I would be glad to sit down and work through his math questions.
The next day he came home and told me he talked with the teacher and he understood the problems. I told him that I loved math and was looking forward to sitting down with him but he looked at me calmly and said, “seriously dad – I’m okay”. He went back to getting straight A’s again.
Years later he explained that he was simply being overwhelmed with stress and he just needed me to listen to him. He was terrified about how I would react to such a bad grade. He thought I would be angry and that I would punish him. Instead he began to realize that grades were really just a means to an end and that sooner or later a less than perfect grade was inevitable. He also started to work hard for himself and not do it out of fear of me.
My son later got a full-ride scholarship to West Virginia University and he just passed his MCATS to get into medical school. My thoughts often go back to that over stressed young man trying to cope with the crushing pressure he was feeling and who was just looking for a little bit of patience and understanding.
I’m glad I didn’t overreact or punish him.
