Salty Landlord Sues Review Site Over Dubious Comments
There’s something to be said about calling an ace an ace, but a slumlord generally doesn’t like being called a slumlord. Whether or not a particular Philadelphia landlord is worthy of that distinction is the subject of a lawsuit being brought against the website WhoseYourLandlord.com (yes, that’s ‘whose’ and not ‘who’s;’ yes, there’s a reason; more on that later), which describes itself as “Yelp for renters.” WYL was founded by Ofo Ezeugwu, a Temple grad, and the startup has been praised by the New York Post, Tech Crunch, ABC News, and Philadelphia Magazine. According to the site, WYL uses “the possessive form of the word ‘who’ because [they’re] giving renters ownership of their living situation by putting housing in their hands.” Apparently, WYL is giving renters too much power for Peter Crawford, whose whole basis of suing WYL is predicated on some dubious comments left by anonymous commenters.
On Crawford’s page on WYL, he is accused of taking renters’ deposits without good reason, of having bedbugs in some of his units, not keeping properties safe, and of – this is a direct quote – being a “psychopath.” The comments led to Crawford being rounded up as one of “2017’s WORST Landlords in Philadelphia” on the WYL blog. On one hand, commenters on WYL are not screened, and there’s no means of verifying if their reports are true. On the other hand, where there’s smoke there’s usually fire, and it takes more salt than a truck full of Morton’s to sue a rate/review site for comments left about oneself or one’s business.
In the exact words of the suit, quoted by Philadelphia Magazine, WYL’s “failure to investigate the truth of these statements prior to publishing them was done in reckless disregard to Plaintiffs’ reputations and the truth. Particularly, when those statements are used as a reference to justify calling [Peter Crawford] one of the worst landlords in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”
Apparently Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act covers websites’ butts for “user-generated content,” but WYL’s choice to aggregate the bad reviews and repackage them into content for their blog and social media may actually be cause for action.
Crawford’s lawyer told PhillyMag that he first aimed a cease-and-desist at WYL in December, but there was no comment from the site. The negative reviews of Crawford and the “Worst Landlords” blog post remain active.
The suit requests that WYL take down the comments about Crawford, as well as pay him $120k in “injuries” as well as lawyers’ fees. In my opinion, this whole thing is completely ludicrous. Now I’m waiting for my jerk of a stats prof that I burned on Rate My Professors in 2006 to come back to haunt me. I don’t have access to the “lmfao” emoji on this keyboard, but just imagine that I spammed it right here.
