This week, board members at a Prospect Park co-op building sued Brenda Williams, claiming she pretended her dead aunt was still alive for over three years to continue paying her $287.55 a month rent and live in her rent stabilized apartment. Williams defended herself to the Post today, vowing to keep fighting to stay in the apartment: “I’ve been living here since 1985. [Landlord Phil Cramer] knew I was there — he met me there,” Williams said. “They think since she passed away that I can’t stay. All of a sudden they want to come at me with their big guns. Pull out whatever you need. I’ll pull out what I got.”
Williams' aunt, Debbie Vaughn, moved into the building in 1959 (her last rent increase was in 1985). She died in April 2007 at the age of 91, but the board claims in their lawsuit Williams continued making her rent payments and pretending she was still alive, making up excuses why no one could see her aunt.
Landlord Cramer says he purposefully kept rent low for Vaughn because she was elderly: “She’s an old lady,” Cramer told The Post. “I thought if anything happened to me, I didn’t want anybody kicking her out.” But he claims that Williams has taken advantage of him: “I was trying to do a good thing, but sometimes that can backfire on you. That’s what happened here.”
Cramer claims he only became aware of the alleged scam in 2010, three years after Williams allegedly started lying about her aunt, when co-op board president Diana Hansen-Young and a plumber went to fix a leak in the apartment, only to find an empty room with a bare mattress.
Williams, a city Department of Education school-improvement specialist for 25 years, claims that she has been sharing the apartment with her aunt since 1985 and had been paying the bills the whole time. The board has sued her for $405K in back rent (they say the 550-square-foot pad should go for $2,200 a month). But Williams seems unfazed: “I’m going to stay calm. I’ve got some Easter eggs to hide and to find. I’m not going to worry about it.”
