*Our apartment is rent stabilized.
A few months ago, LL had frivolously brought a Holdover Eviction case against us for something that we did not do (i.e. When we reported about seeing a cockroach on the day of move-in, they immediately blamed us and threatened us to pay the “legal fees” and that they were going to evict us). Since then, they have been using our rent to pay their legal fees. Now, on our account invoice, they made it look like we have not paid the rent in full (thus, late payment fees have been incurring every month).
Fast forward to last week, at the Housing Court, they requested getting a stipulation with reserved rights to pursue the legal fees in a separate court case (i.e. small claims). Since we wanted to minimize incurring more legal fees on our end, we and our lawyers agreed to it with a fair stipulation, including an article that LL should remove the “legal fees” and all associated late fees from our account.
Today, LL says they will not adhere to the stip and refuse to remove the fees. They are still demanding the payment. We asked our lawyers for help, and they said in order to bring a contempt motion so that we could force them to comply, it would cost additional legal fees on our end.
We were wondering if we could, in lieu of contempt motion, just continue to not pay he “legal fees” and all associated late fees? We have been taking screenshots and recording all our payments so we can prove that these are “legal fees”, not some late rent in our account. Here are our questions:
1 - What to do when LL refuses to comply with the stip (aka remove the illegal “legal fees” and “late fees”)?
2 - Can we get sued at small claims even when the lease says no party is entitled to the repayment of legal fees? We are very concerned about having any judgement on our credit report.
3 - Would this impact our security deposit? How do we make sure that we get our security deposit back after moving out? LL is notoriously known to not return the security deposit. When can you sue them after moving out for unreturned/unfair amount of security deposit?
4 - If you know any major tenant screening data companies, please let us know.
5 - Does reaching out to government agencies help with this kind of tenant harassment? If so, let us know which agencies to reach out to.