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A New York City landlord is facing backlash after she posted a video on TikTok where she claimed she’d been withholding packages sent to her tenant because they were having difficulty paying their rent.
Friday, Abbe Awosanya incited backlash after she posted a TikTok video where she appeared to be celebrating the fact that she’d confiscated the packages of tenants who couldn’t pay their rent.
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“My tenant is late on rent and is avoiding me but has money to order,” read the caption on the video, which showed a Black woman dancing as she held a package. “So I take all their packages until they pay up.”
“I’m so petty,” another on-screen caption read.
The clips quickly sparked public outrage, with viewers in the comments section of the since-deleted video informing her that withholding a tenant’s mail would be illegal. At first, she responded that the packages featured in the clip were not ones she had actually confiscated from her renters.
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This is why we are eating landlords first when we dine on the rich pic.twitter.com/0jVAVoJh9a
— Your gay dad 👨🦽🌿 (@xanderthepander) May 2, 2020
READ MORE: #CancelRent trending nationwide as tenants fight against payments
But Saturday while speaking to BuzzFeed News she said the whole premise of the video was a joke.
“Honestly, in the past, I had this issue with other tenants and I wished I could do this to them because they were blatantly ignoring me,” she told BuzzFeed News in a text message.
To those who say her joke was heartless in light of current events, she clarified that her clip had, “Nothing to do with current tenants,” or the current financial hardships brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite the fact that New York has been one of the worst-hit areas in the country, with a disproportionate number of those affected being those in Black and Brown communities, Awosanya – who has been accused of threatening legal action against someone who shared her video – maintains that all her tenants were up to date on rent payments.
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