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Landlord Creates False E-Mails to Defame and Harrass Tenants

by Will Safer on April 29, 2008 at 09:02 AM

A San Francisco landlord couple is accused of manufacturing false e-mail messages as part of a larger effort to harass and oust a tenant in a residential building they own. The harassment includes cutting power to the tenant, turning off the water, throwing rocks through his window and even setting fire to the vacant apartment below his.

All these things are reason enough to question the morality (and the sanity) of the landlords Kip and Nicole Macy, but when they apparently started creating false e-mail messages to the tenant's own lawyer in his name – with threatening statements – we start to question their intelligence. They also manufactured false e-mail messages from the tenant to their own lawyer, allegedly threatening the lawyer's children. Kip Macy is a software engineer, and while he certainly knows his way around a computer, he apparently didn't bother to check if the tenant, Scott Morrow, actually has an e-mail account. Well, he doesn't. And a judge has agreed with him.

Now the Macys' actions have landed them in criminal court, with felony counts of burglary, theft, conspiracy and stalking.

The harassment has been going on since the Macys bought the building where Morrow lives in 2005. Since then, Morrow has had to endure a series of incidents all intended to "encourage" him to leave. Under San Francisco law, landlords can evict tenants under certain circumstances, but Morrow's situation doesn't meet that criteria. (This is also something we'd expect Nicole Macy to know, since she's a real estate broker.)

This is the one time here at Switched that we're happy for the guy who doesn't use e-mail.

From Vallywag and SFGate.

Tags: breaking news, BreakingNews, crime, real estate, RealEstate

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