Originally posted by @Jimmy M.:
Hi, Looking for advice for my sister to get out of her lease before we contact the landlord again. Here's the situation: For the past few weeks, around midnight once or twice a week she thought she heard porn being played by a neighbor very loud and very clear. She took videos, contacted the landlord, let him know how unsafe and uncomfortable she felt with this going on. Landlord responded but did not do much or offer much guidance. Fast forward to last night. A neighbor next door sees a guy outside her window masturbating and playing porn on his phone. This is clearly the situation, someone had followed her and was doing this deliberately outside her window. A police report was filed, they took down all the information, and they think it actually is the same person who had been doing this all over Chicago.
The unit is a 1st floor studio in a 10-20 unit building in Chicago near Wrigley Field.
Our goal is to now contact the landlord with a clear and concise request to terminate this lease, as she no longer feels safe there.. She is going to be staying with us until we find her another apartment that is not on the 1st floor or Ground floor. My brother is a lawyer and has offered to step in, citing clear negligence of safety after multiple requests. What we are really looking for is guidance on how to best approach the landlord to just have the lease terminated so she can move on past this horrible experience. Any guidance or thoughts?
My initial idea is to try to handle it nicely, if he has another building that feels safer and not a ground floor, she would entertain looking at units there to not cause him financial harm. I don't think in good conscious she would sublease this unit now.
Thoughts welcome.
Damn, your sister seems preoccupied with sex in the neighborhood. I could see how it would be uncomfortable, but how exactly does the neighbor playing pornography in the comfort of his own home next door make her feel "unsafe," as you mentioned? Is she afraid the porn is going to come sneaking through the wall to corrupt her innocence? Or is it a blanket assumption that anyone who could possibly listen to or watch porn in the middle of the night is only a half-step away from violent rape? If that's what your sister thinks, then she must live in a lot of fear.
I think this is confirmed by the second part of the story. A neighbor sees someone flogging the log outside her window and (horrors!) playing a blue movie on his phone. Again, there's a whole boatload of assumptions here based on this piece of hearsay, a police report is filed, culminating in the certainty that this is some kind of famed and notorious meat-beating serial sexual predator camping outside.
Your sister is being attacked by X-rated-material-watching monkey-spankers! This "horrible experience" (she listened to a neighbor's story and presumably heard fake moans and groans through a wall, maybe some dirty, dirty talk) is clearly causing her immense psychological harm.
Come on, Jimmy, let's get to the beef. What's really going on here? Did she take the ground-floor apartment and now wants something nicer in what we all know is a very expensive area? Because this sure as hell sounds like a lot of cheap camouflage for what you're going to go to the landlord of this 20-unit building with, a request to move higher. What, has an apartment opened up on the third or fourth floor of this building, maybe advertised for three hundred bucks a month more than what she's paying now, and she wants to break her lease and get in on the new place on the cheap?
I'm finding my suspicions confirmed by how the wording here just dances around this possibility so nimbly...I mean..."she would entertain looking at units there..." WTF, really? In the same building with the lurking nefarious committer of the Sin of Onan outside? With the neighbor whose malevolent smut makes her feel unsafe? Is the presence of a flight of stairs or two going to mitigate the dark danger she believes she's in from that source? Will the prospect of climbing a few stairs frost the neighbor's smoldering gonads in his shorts and rob him of his dastardly courage? And what about the lurking serial chicken-choker with his phone raunch? Your sister's still going to have to go in and out of the door of this building every day. Why stay in a structure which holds so many traumatic horrors for her?
