The cartoonish excess of her behavior at times feels too on-the-nose for even a parody. But this is no parody. It wasn’t enough for Kihagi to attempt to hound elderly people out of her buildings or cut off their electric or water or leave the front door busted so vagrants could amble in and befoul the foyer. It wasn’t enough to point “security” cameras at residents’ doors and windows reducing life in a Kihagi building to time served in the panopticon; it wasn’t enough to wander, uninvited, into tenants’ dwellings; it wasn’t enough to disable the mailbox so that elderly renters had to travel miles to the post office on the off-chance they were given a three-day eviction notice.
Kihagi did all that, but she also had to be theatrical. She accused the city of West Hollywood of discriminating against her because she is a heterosexual. She made protection-racket-like threats regarding a tenant’s pet and how “it would be a shame” if anything happened to it. She posted a notice — in writing, mind you — on the door of Guerrero Street tenant Sylvia Smith accusing the septuagenarian of operating a “900-SEX-TALK” line out of her house (a judge later noted that there was “not a scintilla” of evidence of this, but it did leave Smith mortified, with neighbors shouting, “Sylvia! Give me your number!”).
That theatricality spilled into the courtroom, with onlookers describing Kihagi as blatantly micromanaging her attorneys. She sued three of them after failing to evict Hambury and her husband, Leonard Johnson, pinning the outcome on their “professional negligence” — and not her own unnerving behavior and testimony (or the facts of the case).
This continued in 2018, when Kihagi made a somewhat surreal Jan. 18 appearance in bankruptcy court. To stave off the city’s plan to collect her rents starting on Jan. 1, she had declared four of her LLCs to be bankrupt simultaneously. She failed, however, to hire an attorney — or complete the necessary paperwork disclosing her holdings. Judge Hannah Blumenstiel was not amused.
“This is federal court, not a parking garage,” the judge lectured Kihagi. “When you seek relief in bankruptcy court, you get significant protections. The price for that protection is transparency.”
There are always going to be assholes in life. The real problem is uneducated tenants who let assholes push them around. This gives the assholes a sense of entitlement, maybe even believing themselves to be in the right, since they are never challenged. I'll never forget when I sued an owner for illegally withholding deposit, and they were unable to produce a receipt for their deduction. She flew into a rage and said she would appeal, but in the end, she paid, plus court costs.
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