Judge Rejects ​“Retaliation,” Approves Eviction

A two-day eviction trial that revealed how emotionally fraught a long-term tenant-landlord relationship can get has culminated with a judge ordering the renter to leave because her lease has expired.

The legal debate at the trial centered on what counts as landlord ​“retaliation.” The judge found that a tenant can’t succeed with such a defense unless she proves that a landlord’s ​“primary motive” in taking her to court was to punish her for speaking out about housing code concerns.

State Superior Court Judge Alayna Stone handed down that five-page decision on Monday in the eviction case Vorcelia Oliphant-Macher v. Shelly Thompson.

The judge’s order — which can be read in full here – comes a full month after the trial took place on Jan. 30 and Feb. 3 in the third-floor housing court at 121 Elm St.

The case itself dates back to July 2024, when Oliphant-Macher, who lives in Meriden, sued to evict Thompson from her apartment in a four-unit building on Cherry Ann Street because Thompson’s month-to-month lease had expired. Oliphant-Macher has owned that building since 1999, and has rented to Thompson since 2008.

In September 2024, Thompson and her legal aid attorney (and potential future state judge) Yonatan Zamir pushed back by arguing that the landlord’s eviction lawsuit constituted retaliation. The lawsuit came within six months of Thompson raising concerns with the city’s Livable City Initiative (LCI) about conditions problems at her Newhallville apartment.

The housing authority wound up cancelling Thompson’s Section 8 rental subsidy to Oliphant-Macher last May after three consecutive failed inspections relating to those very same un-fixed conditions. Among those problems were a leaky ceiling, cracked windows, and a smoke detector in need of repair. Over the course of the trial, Oliphant-Macher repeatedly said she wanted access to the unit to check on the smoke detectors, and claimed that Thompson wouldn’t let her in. 

In her decision on Monday, Stone wrote that ​“there is no evidence that Plaintiff’s primary motive in initiating the eviction action was due to Defendant’s” exercising of her statutory rights in communicating with LCI or the housing authority about needed repairs at her apartment.

The judge wrote that the eviction lawsuit also did not stem from the landlord’s loss of a rental subsidy from the housing authority because of failed inspections. 

Instead, ​“it was brought because Plaintiff is, and has been, very concerned that all of her units have working smoke detectors and is tired [of] fighting to get access so that she can ensure that the smoke detectors are functioning properly. Accordingly, Defendant’s special defense [of retaliation] fails.”

Stone thereby signed off on Oliphant-Macher’s ​“lapse of time” eviction of Thompson. She permitted Thompson to stay in the apartment until the end of April, so long as she pays her landlord $925 per month no later than March 15 and April 15.

3 Inspection Fails, Canceled Sec. 8

According to legal filings and courtroom testimony over the course of the trial, LCI — acting on behalf of the housing authority — failed the property three times across three consecutive Housing Quality Standards inspections in September 2023, May 2024, and June 2024. That led to the termination of Oliphant-Macher’s Housing Assistance Payments (HAP) contract with the housing authority for Thompson’s unit.

The process by which Oliphant-Macher lost her housing authority rental subsidy was laid out most clearly by Tim Regan, a manager in the housing authority’s Housing Choice Voucher (HCV)/Section 8 program. He was called as a witness by Thompson and Zamir and testified during the first day of the trial.

Regan said that the housing authority hires LCI to conduct regular inspections of properties where landlords receive Section 8 rental subsidies. If LCI fails a property two inspections in a row for housing-condition concerns, then that landlord’s rental subsidy is ​“abated,” or paused. If the property fails a third consecutive inspection, then the housing authority outright ends its HAP contract with the landlord for that unit.

This is what happened in Oliphant-Macher and Thompson’s case, he said.

LCI went out for a Section 8 inspection in September 2023, and failed the Cherry Ann Street unit for a number of ​“deficiencies,” including cracked windows and a ceiling in need of repair. LCI returned in May 2024, and failed the property again. That’s when the rent subsidy paid to the landlord was put on pause. 

LCI then failed the apartment for a third and final time in June 2024, leading to the termination of Oliphant-Macher’s HAP contract for Thompson’s apartment.

Oliphant-Macher told the judge and Regan that she had never received the notifications from the housing authority and LCI about the inspection fails. She said she was caught off guard last June, when she stopped receiving her regular monthly rent subsidy payments from the housing authority.

The landlord repeatedly told the court that she filed a lapse of time eviction lawsuit, instead of a ​“for-cause” lawsuit about rent or serious nuisance, because she ​“didn’t want anything to reflect poorly on Ms. Thompson.”

She also returned time and again to problems she had had in getting access to Thompson’s apartment in order to check and make sure that the smoke detectors were working. 

“The whole point is I’m trying to get access to my smoke detectors,” she said in the first of what would be many references to Thompson’s smoke detectors.

Oliphant-Macher wound up subpoenaing city fire inspector Jeffrey Taylor to testify at the trial. He spoke on the trial’s second day about how, after several failed attempts, on May 31, 2024, he was able to gain access to Thompson’s apartment with the tenant’s consent. During that visit, he replaced the batteries in one of the two smoke detectors in her apartment. He also installed a third in the living room.

Later on in the trial, Oliphant-Macher told the judge that she filed the eviction lawsuit against Thompson in part because she had found out that a different tenant in a different unit in the same Cherry Ann Street building had non-functioning smoke detectors. 

She said that, when she saw the smoke detector problem in that unit, she thought about how much difficulty she had gaining access to Thompson’s apartment, and so decided to try to evict her out of a concern that smoke detectors might not be working in Thompson’s unit as well.

"I'm Sick Of This Liar"

The two-day trial grappled not just with the relevant elements of eviction law and retaliation and rental subsidies and smoke detectors, but also with how enmeshed one life becomes in another when you rent to or from someone for a sustained period of time.

Oliphant-Macher, who represented herself in court without the help of an attorney, attacked her tenant’s credibility, praised her character, and implored her to find religion over the course of what proved to be a long, odd, scattered, frequently emotional, and intensely personal court proceeding. 

She asked Thompson questions like, ​“Do you know what it is to tell the truth?” She described her in one moment as ​“a wonderful person” with a ​“charming personality,” and in the next as being a ​“terror,” a ​“liar,” and ​“a thorn in my flesh.”

“She will have to rely on the Lord,” Oliphant-Macher concluded about Thompson.

The landlord also described an alleged conspiracy among the tenant, the city, legal aid, and the housing authority. ​“It just comes down to what’s right,” the landlord said. And nothing about this situation has been right or fair to her, as all other parties have been ​“very biased” against her.

Thompson sat quietly alongside Zamir for most of the trial. She wore a face mask and a winter beanie hat, and several times, beset by fits of coughing, got up and used her walker to exit the courtroom to catch her breath. As a witness interviewed by both her lawyer and her landlord, Thompson mostly kept her answers short and to the point. 

She disagreed with Oliphant-Macher’s characterization of just about every aspect of their landlord-tenant relationship — about whether she had violated terms of her lease by putting an antenna on the roof; about whether her landlord had obstructed her walking path with a large, heavy bucket of salt; about whether she has a deeply ingrained problem with all landlords, as Oliphant-Macher consistently claimed.

Even when Thompson got worked up in response to Oliphant-Macher’s needling under oath, Zamir cautioned her to rein it in and answer the questions succinctly. He then focused his arguments before the judge on the relevant portions of eviction and retaliation law.

Judge Stone made clear to both parties that the legal issues at stake in the trial were the lease-expiration claim by the landlord and the retaliation claim by the tenant. And yet, Oliphant-Macher consistently sought to paint a broader picture of why she wanted Thompson out.

Along the way, the landlord consistently struggled to introduce evidence or question witnesses in line with the rules of a trial. Judge Stone advised her to ​“lay a foundation” for any piece of evidence she sought to introduce to the court — that is, to ask a witness if they’re familiar with the document and can speak credibly to its contents — before questioning the witness about the substance of the document itself.

“I don’t mean to take up the court’s time. I really thought I was organized,” Oliphant-Macher said as she shuffled through a duffel bag’s worth of legal papers, trying to find the ones she most wanted to bring to the court’s attention.

As much as Oliphant-Macher sought to follow the judge’s advice and stick to questioning and then arguments about the underlying lapse of time claim and retaliation defense, she kept coming back to what has clearly become a fraught personal relationship with Thompson.

“Ms. Thompson, do you know what perjury is?” she asked when trying to find out if her tenant ever filed a complaint against her previous landlord, two decades ago.

“Yes, I’m familiar with it. It’s to tell a lie, which I’m not doing,” Thompson responded.

“Would you say you have issues with landlords? Do you have issues with people having control of their properties?” Oliphant-Macher asked a little later on, during a discussion about whether or not Thompson had ever had a party at her apartment — allegedly in violation of her lease.

“No,” Thompson replied.

“When you’re being very vicious to your landlord, you have every reason to believe someone’s going to boot you out,” Oliphant-Macher said.

Towards the end of the trial, Oliphant-Macher was overcome with her frustration with her tenant — this time amid a line of inquiry about whether the landlord had placed a bucket of salt outside the apartment during the winter to impede the tenant’s path.

“I’ve had enough of her. She’s lying,” the landlord told the court. ​“I’m sick of this liar.”

“You can stop asking questions if you don’t like the answers,” the judge advised her.

“She has so much gall,” the landlord said in another fit of pique about her tenant. ​“She’s a liar. I can’t put up with this anymore.”

“If you cannot control yourself, we cannot continue,” the judge said. ​“What you will not do is have another outburst.”

Oliphant-Macher later apologized for her breakdown, and thanked the judge for her patience.

In her concluding remarks, Oliphant-Macher went back in time to 2008 when she first met Thompson and decided to rent to her. She said that she visited Thompson’s then-apartment on Alton Street and noted how clean she kept her place, even in a building that Oliphant-Macher said was not good enough for the tenant. ​“She seemed to be such a nice lady,” Oliphant-Macher recalled. But now, she said, her tenant is a ​“terror” and she just wants control of her property back.

Zamir concluded his side’s case to the judge by stating that the landlord had served a notice to quit within six months of LCI’s failing the apartment following a May 2024 inspection, thereby violating state anti-retaliation law. The landlord has therefore not succeeded in rebutting the retaliation claim, he said, and the judge should find in favor of the defense.

“This is a lot,” state Superior Court Judge Alayna Stone confessed at the end of the trial as she took in all the evidence, witness testimony, and arguments made over the course of two days in court. She promised at 4:15 p.m. Monday to issue a written decision in the case.

Judge: This Wasn't Retaliation

A month later, Stone issued her decision in the case, siding with Oliphant-Macher and ordering Thompson’s eviction because her lease had expired.

As part of her ruling, Stone explained why she found that the eviction lawsuit did not qualify as landlord retaliation against a tenant.

She quoted the relevant section of state law 47a-33 as reading that tenants can successfully defend themselves against an eviction by showing that a landlord took such a legal action ​“solely because the defendant attempted to remedy, by lawful means, including contacting officials of the state or of any town, city, borough or public agency or filing a complaint with a fair rent commission, any condition constituting a violation of any of the provisions of chapter 368o, or of chapter 412, or of any other state statute or regulation or of the housing or health ordinances of the municipality wherein the premises which are the subject of the complaint lie.”

The tenant must then prove that the landlord’s ​“primary motive in initiating the eviction was in retaliation for the tenant’s exercise of his statutory right to report housing code violations to the appropriate authorities.”

Stone found that Thompson and Zamir failed to make this retaliation argument in part by claiming that the eviction was brought in retaliation for the housing authority’s cancellation of the rental subsidy because of the failed inspections, as opposed to because of Thompson’s direct housing-code complaints to LCI. 

“First, Defendant did not take any action to trigger the suspension of the HAP payments,” Stone wrote. She wrote that the housing authority requires annual inspections of Section 8 apartments, and that these inspections had been paused ​“for years” during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Stone wrote the inspections resumed at this apartment only because the landlord had contacted LCI to complain that an inspection hadn’t occurred in nearly three years, and that Oliphant-Macher was concerned about the unit because she ​“had not been able to access the apartment. Defendant did not attempt to exercise her statutory right to report housing code violations; Plaintiff did. Thus, Defendant cannot claim retaliation when she undertook no actions to seek to remedy the violations.”

And even if the facts of the case could be construed to show that Thompson did exercise her legal rights to make a housing code complaint by letting LCI into her apartment, ​“there is no evidence that Plaintiff’s primary motive in initiating the eviction action was due to Defendant’s actions.”

Stone wrote that the landlord provided evidence that she has been ​“complaining about her inability to access the premises for nearly a decade.” She previously sought to evict Thompson for the tenant’s ​“consistent resistance to allowing Plaintiff access to Defendant’s apartment for repairs.” That ​“lack of cooperation” on the tenant’s part was ​“obvious,” Stone wrote, when the tenant was unavailable to allow the fire inspector into her apartment on May 24, but did let LCI in on that same day.

“Moreover, the Court credits Plaintiff’s testimony that she is not attempting to harm Defendant, hence why she brought the action for lapse of time rather than nonpayment of rent. This action was not brought because of the abated rent.” Instead, it was brought because of the landlord’s desire that all of her apartments have working smoke detectors, Stone concluded, and her long-standing frustration with not being able to access Thompson’s apartment.

“Based upon the evidence presented, the Court enters judgment of possession in favor of Plaintiff on the ground of lapse of time.”