Court Rejects Suit Against Tenant Organizers
The owners of five buildings in the Bronx have failed to raise a triable issue of fact that tenant organizers interfered with their ability to get mortgages, a state judge has ruled in granting summary judgment dismissing the owners’ case. In New Line Realty V Corp. v. United Committees of University Heights, 1021/04, Supreme Court Justice Sally Manzanet-Daniels of the Bronx found that the owners had failed to submit “any evidence in admissible form” to prove that tenant organizers from the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition had taken actions to frustrate their ability to get refinancing for their buildings.
The decision will be published Monday. The owners had claimed that as a result of picketing, circulating fliers and other activities aimed at Washington Mutual Bank, the bank had pulled a letter of intent to refinance a mortgage issued in 2000. The owners claimed damages of $1.8 million.
The organizers denied any intent to interfere with the owners’ prospects for refinancing, and contended that instead they were trying to enforce a provision in the existing mortgage that required the owners to keep the buildings in good repair. The owners’ claim for tortious interference with prospective economic advantage was the sole surviving claim of their lawsuit, filed in 2004, which also raised claims of trespass and libel against the Northwest Bronx group, a 30-year-old, clergy-based community organization.
The owners had withdrawn their trespass claim, and Justice Manzanet-Daniels had dismissed the libel claim in 2006. Under a law adopted in 1992 designed to protect tenants and others who are asserting a First Amendment right to petition government, Justice Manzanet-Daniels wrote, the owners were required to show that their claims against the Northwest Bronx group have “a substantial basis in law and fact.”
The 1992 law (Civil Rights Law §§70-a, 76-a) was designed to curb lawsuits aimed at deterring the exercise of free speech rights by both creating a higher standard to establish a claim’s viability and giving defendants the right to counterclaim for violations of their speech rights. Suits aimed at stifling efforts to petition the government for redress of grievances and to express views at public hearings have been dubbed “Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation,” or SLAPP, suits.
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