When housing is scarce, landlords hold the keys to more than just the front door.

When one struggling tenant was faced with eviction and endless harassment from a greedy landlord, she found a legal loophole that turned what seemed like a hopeless case in her favor!

Read on for the whole story!

Harass my family and threaten my kids? I’ll make you lose your claim for late fees and interest.

We live on a Native American reservation.

The law here is based upon tribal teachings.

The judges travel around our reservation because there are not enough to go around.

As a result, A LOT of offenses get mediated or dismissed by the court.

Crimes go unpunished due to this lack of judges and police.

So landlord tenant disputes fall way down the priority list.

When it came to housing, this struggling family was desperate.

We needed a place to stay asap, we were being evicted from our current place due to the behavior of one of our children.

Anyway, we looked in our small town and found nothing.

Then, someone said they saw a for rent sign and told us where to go.

We called the number and got in touch with a lady who lived in town.

The lady said the rental agent lived in a town where my mother lives and where she grew up and knows a ton of people.

I called her and asked her if she knew this person, she said yes and that they were related to us!

She called the agent (now relative) and they said they were renting the place for their sister who lived in another state.

They took the first thing they could find, even though the conditions weren’t ideal.

They had just evicted the prior tenants and the place hadn’t been cleaned up yet.

We told him we needed a place soon and would clean up the place ourselves.

(We had NO idea what we were getting ourselves into.)

He directed us back to his niece who we talked to initially.

She lived in our town and could show us the place.

Being desperate, we overlooked cosmetic issues like the tub being turned on with a crescent wrench, filthy, filthy carpet, non-working cooler, huge burn on the carpet in front of the fireplace, broken windows and door.

The door seriously never locked the entire time we lived there.

We paid the deposit and first moths rent and moved in on assurances the the missing or broken things would be fixed.

It was just getting to winter and we were excited to have a central cooler for the heat of summer.

But living there turned out to be even more harrowing than the family expected.

Over time, nothing was fixed.

Or, if it was, it soon broke.

Cosmetic issues were ignored, the house always seemed cold even if the fireplace was blazing away, the stove only had two working burners etc.

But, we enjoyed the large property and had room for a trampoline and a large garden.

We were relatively happy at the home and were there for several months when un-repaired things got out of hand.

We had stopped calling the niece and rental agent and communicated directly with the landlady.

She even came by a few times while she was in town and we had a few long phone calls talking about our lives.

The landlord really wasn’t that interested in helping them out.

Due to our status as her family, I think she used to to not really do the proper repairs or ignoring the situation.

Also the fact that housing here is really hard to find and she knew it.

So, we put up with it until summer came with no working cooler.

We told the landlady, again.

Jump to a few weeks later and we are still without a cooler.

I tell her were taking half the cost of all the fans we had to buy out of the rent and a partial refund for the 6 weeks we had been without a cooler plus any time after that we didn’t have one.

After multiple complaints, the family starts to get on the landlord’s bad side.

She suddenly becomes short and says I have to pay rent in full.

We go back and forth for a while and things get a bit heated.

She is really ticked now and I know I’ve said things that weren’t nice but she wasn’t either.

We end the call with nothing resolved.

Now the costs of past debts are starting to add up.

Months pass, weather gets cool and we pay full rent again.

All this time she is charging us late fees for the months during the summer where we only paid partial rent.

Really we deducted only $25 dollars a month for three or four months when we needed the cooler.

We did this every summer we lived there.

We are short and businesslike when we speak, but she she begins to call us to ask when we will have the money for the back rent and 2 dollar a day late fee.

We rock along like this a few summers.

Then the landlord started charging for more things too.

We also took money out for repairs to the house.

She hated that and deducted the repair costs to our owed balance.

She harassed us by phone and in person whenever she could.

The family was struggling with money, but they did the best they could.

I should explain that by this time we were having financial problems.

My husband, who works from home was making less money.

I had job I loved but was not making much more than minimum age.

So, we fell behind in rent but she got money whenever we did.

I kept track as she never ever provided us with a receipt.

After another year of this, she got more demanding and started to threaten eviction over the disputed cooler money, repairs, late fees and a months rent.

Then the landlord started threatening eviction.

This goes on for a few months and she then says she is going to come to town and get the money personally or evict us.

Soon. She didn’t say when.

Great.

The renter had enough of this and started wondering just how legal all of this was, so she did some digging.

I did the only thing I could think of.

I knew some of the things she was doing were not legal. But, the reservation I lived on had its own laws and people to tend to look upon the reservation as a sort of lawless place.

I looked up tribal laws on landlord tenant disputes.

There were none.

Just a few sentences saying they went by our states landlord tenant laws.

Finally, the renter found something that just might help her and her struggling family.

What this lady didn’t know was that I love the law.

I read law cases for fun.

Many an evening I spent reading law threads, criminal cases etc.

So, I found and printed out the entire landlord tenant laws.

Like, over 100 pages. I read and reread the laws. I had my ammunition.

She goes back and forth with the landlord, but things don’t get any better.

She ends up calling me a week or so later to threaten us agin.

By this time we had been there over 4 years and I unleash 4+ years of complaints and how by law we are entitled to the deductions.

She basically tells me she will get her money and that our states laws don’t apply here.

The landlord even resorts to spying on the family.

She starts to call more frequently to harass us.

Her fave was to leave long threatening messages.

When she was in town, she had a neighbor spy on us and and tell her when we left the house.

Her tactic was to show up mere minutes after we left.

Our daughter would call us and tell us she was there.

She would tell the kids she was there to inspect and come in.

She would ask the kids if we left her any money.

It was unsettling. We felt harassed.

And you don’t mess with my kids!

Everything culminated in a court case.

So, in an effort to make her back off, we filed a restraining order against her.

She had come over and threatened to lock the gate and lock us out.

The case was set for the following week.

I am assuming she knew people either in the police department or court because she was not served until the morning of the hearing, but somehow came prepared.

The renter tells her side of the story, but not without frequent interjections from the landlord.

We showed up to the court and I tell the judge that she is harassing us.

I show him the lease and tell him all the things that have been going on.

She interrupts a few times and gets reprimanded.

We get to the part where she threatened to lock us out.

She breaks in and says that a cop told her she could do that.

The judge told her no and that she could be sued if she did that.

She gives the cops name in an effort to get him in trouble for telling her incorrect information.

But the judge wasn’t so sympathetic to the landlord’s story.

The judge doesn’t care and tells her she cannot threaten her tenants with a lock out without proper procedure.

Then, she tries to get the judge to serve us with a 30-day eviction notice.

The judge says he’s not a process server and also the notice cannot be written for 30 days as the lease says 60 days notice.

I wanted to laugh at this point.

Turns out, the landlord didn’t exactly have the top-notch counsel.

Her lawyer brother had advised her will wrong because I’m thinking he never read the tenant laws.

Anyway, I get no restraining order but he tells her to back off and nothing was said about the other house issues but, she gets reprimanded by the judge.

Some things are solved, but the threat of eviction still looms.

I now know that she is trying to evict us.

So, besides stepping up my house hunting efforts, I go over my documentation of our house paperwork and decide to write a letter to her stating the date I thought our lease ended saying she cannot come over without proper notice and to only communicate with us via post.

Then the renter noticed something unsettling in their lease agreement.

After I sent the letter a casual perusal of our lease revealed to me that our lease had no end date!

We were locked into this lease as long as she wanted!

She could charge us late fees forever! We were toast! I was so upset. How could I mess up like that?

A few days later, I get a reply from her brother.

He concurs with our lease end date. Crap.

It was about 3 years prior so, with no valid lease they can evict us in 30 days per state law.

They inform us of this in the letter.

My heart sinks. I go back to my tenant law and sure enough, it’s there.

But there’s a silver lining just beneath the surface.

But, I see a law stating that with no lease, she cannot charge us late fees or interest.

This is the bulk of what she says we owe her.

The reason we began all this in the first place.

I break out my adding machine and go over payments made since the lease ended which was way before we got behind on rent.

We were only $375 behind.

So the renter shares what she found with the landlord.

I write them a letter stating that I got their eviction notice.

I informed them that the cancelling of the lease concurred by both parties negated the late fees and interest the landlady wanted.

I enclosed a check (all we had) for the balance and said that crashing of the check would signal that payment to her was in full.

The renter fantasizes about how mad the landlord was that she was outsmarted at her own game.

I always wonder what their reaction to my letter was.

Finding out they screwed themselves by cancelling the lease.

They were so focused on evicting us they forgot to keep an eye on the whole picture and read the law.

During all this time, she had been laughing at us telling us state law had nothing to do with our reservation and asking for her money in nastier and nastier tones.

I imagine she was mad at her brother for the bad advice.

She wanted money from us badly and he advised her to agree with us and cancel the lease 3 years prior to get us out in 30 days.

Which solved her immediate problem, but negated her claim on money which was her whole motivation.

The renter decided to quit while she was ahead and finally move on with her life.

I did not go after the deposit.

That would’ve entailed more court and I had a life to live.

I also highly doubt I have ever got a penny from her.

My vengeance was done.

Knowing I outsmarted a lawyer added frosting on top of the cake.

Don’t mess with me or my family even if you’re part of it.

Reddit loves a good underdog story.

Let’s see what commenters had to say.

This story may just prove this renter has a future in the law profession!

This user thinks the landlord would benefit more from just cutting her losses with these tenants.

This commenter is also impressed by the renter’s budding legal prowess.

The landlord should know better than anyone else how important it is to read the fine print!

Justice may be slow, but it always catches up eventually.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.