Buzzfeed – When Gail Savage’s landlord messaged asking her if she would “stay all night” with him (seen above), she assumed he’d texted the wrong number.
“I was like, He probably meant to send that to his girlfriend,” Savage, 29, told BuzzFeed News.
“Are you asking me in a sexual way?” she texted.
“Yes,” her landlord replied.
“The second I figured out it was happening, it was the craziest thing: I put Salem in his car seat and walked out the door,” said Savage. “I was like, I don’t know where I’m going, but I can’t stay. I was scared.”
Another horrific anecdote from the same Buzzfeed article:
Jerry Miles, a 20-year-old college student in Indianapolis, was desperate for a place to live when he found a room in February in a shared house. Prior to that, Miles had temporarily been staying with a family friend after his father was jailed.
But on March 26, as the coronavirus pandemic prompted rolling government shutdowns, his boss informed him that his hours working as a valet would probably drop from 35 a week to none. Miles reached out to his new landlord informing him of the situation. They agreed that when his $1,200 stimulus check came from the government, he would give $1,000 to his landlord to cover two months of rent upfront.
On April 10, the landlord pulled up in front of Miles’ home, just as Miles was heading off to do deliveries for Postmates. The landlord asked where the rent money was. Miles replied that he didn’t have it yet and that he was still waiting for the stimulus check. That’s when, according to Miles, the landlord said he had to pay the rent because Miles surely did not want the landlord to come over and rape him.
In shock, Miles replied no, he said. His landlord then said he would only be able to last five minutes, so he’d have to bring friends, insinuating they would gang-rape him. According to Miles, his landlord told him he and his friends would have to do it every day until the debt was paid, and that Miles should consider prostituting himself. Miles said he laughed awkwardly and told the landlord the conversation made him uncomfortable. The landlord eventually drove away.
Here at Side Action we mostly focus on the world of sports and its various off-court and off-field tales. But some of the stories in this article — including another anecdote with a 29-year-old woman’s widower landlord who asked her if she had a boyfriend, then indicated he’d accept a “barter” system if she wanted to use part of her deposit for the month’s rent — are too unbelievable and insane not to share.
I’m a renter in downtown Los Angeles and I too have a crappy management company who attempts to fleece our tenants, including amenities charges that are built into our rent despite these being unavailable for two months now. But at least with my incompetent landlord, when they attempt to screw me it’s mostly in the financial sense. To go above and beyond with this kind of borderline extortion is about as dark as it gets in a time where unemployment rates are the highest since the Great Depression.
If you’re a landlord out there, keep it in your pants. Perhaps try the wealth of adult film sites out there with actors playing the parts of landlord and “down on his or her luck tenant” to scratch that itch in a more socially acceptable way. We as a society could all stand to be less awful and I, for one, think that battle begins with landlords who don’t threaten their tenants with sexual assault for unpaid rent checks. I’ll bravely go out on that limb.
