2023-11-08 12:07:32
Woman lived in luxury Airbnb for 570 days without paying rent
Even after her booking expired, a woman stayed in a guesthouse in California and continually sued the landlord. Now she’s gone – or is she?
The woman stayed in a guest house in a posh area of Los Angeles without paying rent.
Photo: Keystone
570 days. That’s how long Elizabeth Hirschhorn lived in a luxurious guest house in the posh Brentwood district of Los Angeles without paying a cent in rent. The Los Angeles Times recently called her “the tenant from hell” in a report. The law in the US state of California is notoriously pro-tenant and is often satirized in sitcoms. In the series “Silicon Valley,” for example, someone lives rent-free in the protagonist’s house virtually the whole time – without anyone being able to do anything about it.
Elizabeth Hirschhorn rented the guest house of dentist Sascha Jovanovic for 187 days via the Airbnb platform in September 2021, for a price of $20,793. After the Airbnb contract expired, Hirschhorn didn’t move out and simply stopped paying rent. Their reasoning: Jovanovic doesn’t have permission from the city to rent out the guesthouse at all – so he can’t throw her out. Sounds like a Schildbürger thesis, but now comes the highlight of Hirschhorn’s argument: He also had the shower installed without permission, and without a shower he would never have been able to rent out the guest house, especially not for six months.
Under California law, a judge ruled, Jovanovic actually shouldn’t have been allowed to rent. So Hirschhorn stayed and sued Jovanovic several more times: firstly because, in her opinion, he did not make necessary repairs such as removing mold – and secondly because she felt harassed by his attempts to get her to move out. She told Jovanovic that she would move out, but only for a fee of $100,000. Yes, that really happened. The Times documented all of this in a report that appeared four weeks ago.
Suddenly the movers came
Last Friday the surprising turnaround: Hirschhorn left the guest house. Jovanovic noticed that movers were moving their furnishings out. After consulting with the police and lawyers, he entered the guest house – and in fact it was completely empty. Hirschhorn was gone. “I was a little overwhelmed, but I finally had a quieter weekend,” Jovanovic told the Times. He wants to continue the lawsuit because of outstanding rents, which now amount to $58,000, but he wants to drop everything else: “We have to get rid of the bad energy.” He wants to get rid of the mold and obtain all permits for renting in the future.
That would of course be a happy ending. Given how this case has gone so far, it is also an unlikely one – and lo and behold: On Tuesday, Hirschhorn’s lawyer Amanda Seward wrote in an email to Jovanovic’s lawyers: “Ms. Hirschhorn is worried because she is constantly harassed and is monitored.” So it could be that all the hype after the report just got too much for her and that’s why she left.
However, the lawyer continues: “You had no authority to change the locks and assume that the residential unit had been abandoned. You broke the law by entering the guesthouse without permission and changing the locks.” So that means: There’s more to come – and it could be that the occupation doesn’t last 570 days.
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