Roommate Blackmailed And Tried To Get A Fellow Roomie Kicked Out, So The Others Conspired To Get Her To Sign Herself Out Of The Lease

Matthew Gilligan

9 months ago

Source: Reddit/AITA/Unsplash/@sigmund

Bad roommates…they’re THE WORST.

And if you’ve been there, then you know I speak THE TRUTH.

So how do you handle someone like this?

Well, check out what this person did…you might want to take some pointers…

Roommate blackmailed us and almost lost us our apartment, so we played dirty.

“So, my friend and I were in our second year of college together, and were roommates. We were both transfers and going into senior year, and had been renting an apartment for the past year.

The two of us had lived with three other people the first year, but they graduated and moved out. The apartment had two rooms, and a den with double doors that could be used for one person. We had had two people in each room and one in the den.

We needed to find people to replace our old housemates, and my friend knew a couple people who were living together and wanted to move to a new place together. She talked to them and set everything up before summer, so that way during the fall we would already have everything figured out.

Everything seemed to be in order.

We signed the lease before summer vacation and everything seemed fine. One girl wanted to rent out the big room to herself, and would pay full price for it, let’s call her Sherin. The other one would live in the den who I will call Carrie. There would only be four of us instead of five the coming year, which we were looking forward to.

However, over the summer, Sherin started having second thoughts about living with Carrie. Apparently while living together they’d had some issues. Sherin called my friend and I and told us that apparently Carrie had pushed her down the stairs while they were living together, and she bought pepper spray and a taser just in case…

According to Sherin, one night they thought they heard someone trying to break into their apartment and were standing at the top of the stairs listening, when Carrie told Sherin to go check it out. Sherin didn’t want to go, so Carrie pushed her and Sherin fell down the stairs.

There were conflicting stories.

We asked Carrie about this, but she said that while they heard suspicious activity and called the police, she never pushed Sherin down the stairs. My friend and I didn’t know what to believe and ultimately told Sherin they’d have to work it out, since she was the one having doubts.

We also told her that if she changed her mind we’d need at least a month’s notice. Sherin decided she still wanted to live with us and was ok living with the other girl, so we thought it was fine.

Summer passes and fall arrives, Sherin is moving in. Carrie is planning on moving in a few days later. However, Sherin brings someone over to the apartment, and starts showing her around.

Hmmm…

She apparently wanted a roommate and wanted us to sign the new person onto our lease with an addendum, but she hadn’t talked to us about it before. Apparently, she still didn’t feel safe with Carrie around, and said she’d feel safer with a roommate.

She told her potential roommate she hadn’t known she’d be living with Carrie, even though the four of us had signed addendum to put them both on the lease at the same time. My friend and I thought things were getting weird at this point and started feeling concerned.

Unfortunately, our lease was going to expire soon and we needed to sign the lease renewal in a few days, and we couldn’t get an addendum to sign the new person on until we signed the lease renewal. My friend and I had let the Sherin and Carrie know this in advance and they had agreed beforehand to sign it.

If we didn’t sign it in time, we would have to start an entirely new lease, and the price would go up a lot which we couldn’t afford, so if we didn’t sign our new lease agreement in time, we would all have to find another place to live. Since school was about to start, it would have been hard to find another place to live so quickly.

This wouldn’t have been an issue, but then Sherin was afraid that Carrie wouldn’t sign the new person onto the lease, and said she wouldn’t sign the lease renewal if we didn’t add her roommate first.

This wasn’t cool.

We got mad because she had never even asked us if we were ok with living with one more person, or let us know beforehand, and now she was risking everyone’s place to stay to try and make us sign someone we’d never met onto the lease.

We told Sherin we couldn’t sign her roommate on before renewing the lease since we had to renew it so soon, which was the apartment’s rules. She kept making more demands, and told us that if we didn’t do what she wanted, then she wouldn’t sign the lease renewal and we’d all be without a place to live.

She wanted me to observe a verbal agreement as a third party person, between her and Carrie, where Carrie would agree to sign the new person onto the lease after we signed the lease renewal.

Then things escalated.

I told her I wasn’t comfortable with this. So this is where the fun starts. Carrie seemed nice so far, and my friend and I were really uncomfortable with how Sherin was acting. She continued to move all of her stuff in while telling us her “conditions.”

We wouldn’t agree to any of them, not only because there was no way to meet them under the rules of our apartment complex, but also because we weren’t going to let this girl control us like that, and make us live with someone we didn’t know if we wanted to live with.

However, then Sherin came up with a clever idea. She said that we could sign her off of the lease with an addendum, then sign the lease renewal with Carrie, and then sign her and her roommate back onto the lease, that way she would have no chance of getting stuck on the lease without a roommate.

My friend and I told her that we agreed to this, and told Carrie as well, who also agreed.

My friend and I went to the office to let them know, so they wrote the addendum to take Sherin off of the lease. Everyone in the apartment had to sign it in order for it to be valid. My friend, Carrie and I signed it, and waited for Sherin to sign it after telling her it was ready. She went downstairs and signed herself off of the lease.

Sorry…

After this, she came back up, and my friend and I informed her that we would not be signing her back onto the lease. She got really upset. She told us that if we didn’t want to live with her she would have signed herself off anyways, but we didn’t believe her.

She started crying, and told us that she had just finished setting up her desk. We didn’t care. She had threatened three other people’s security and place to live, as well as her potential roommate’s. She went outside and slammed the door. My friend and I were relieved it was over and that we wouldn’t be losing our apartment. We just needed to find someone to take her place.

Sherin came back in with a smug look on her face and told me she had her mom on the phone and her mom wanted to talk to one of us. I took the phone and put it on speaker while my friend listened.

Uh oh…

Carrie went to her space and closed the door. When I answered the phone, Sherin’s mom went off on me. She called me a ***** and told me to go to hell. I stayed calm and told her that I stood by the decision we made. She told me to go to Hell several more times, then she told me Sherin had nowhere to go and I didn’t give a rat’s ***.

I told her she was right, I didn’t. Her mom told me to go to hell one more time and hung up. I gave the phone back to Sherin, who seemed surprised that I wasn’t intimidated. She whispered “sorry” as I gave her phone back to her. Then she went to her room to take her stuff apart and start packing.

Since we paid the lease in advance for our place, as per the apartment’s rules, Sherin had paid to stay until the end of the month, so we let her stay until then. This gave her about five days to figure something else out. She made it as difficult as possible, but eventually left. Pretty sure I didn’t see her on campus or anything after that, so that was the last time I saw her.

That was a roller coaster!

The best part is that the girl who was going to be Sherin’s roommate still needed a place to stay so we signed her onto the lease and helped her find a roommate. It was actually a fairly lengthy battle, but in the end we won our apartment back.

Word of advice: don’t sign people onto your lease months in advance, even if they will pay for their room while they’re not there. People can make a lot of changes in a few months, and if they don’t know you they won’t care about screwing you over.”

Here’s how people responded.

This person thinks they know who the bully is in this story…