A Manhattan man who lost his apartment after an Airbnb user threw an “XXX freak fest” orgy there said he’s now homeless and “blacklisted” from leasing apartments.
Ari Teman, 33, said he has lived in more than 20 places since raunchy revelers ransacked his Chelsea luxury condo in March 2014.
“I just don’t know where I’m going to sleep next, and that’s getting to be annoying,” the comedian told the Daily news.
Teman made headlines last year after David Carter, a Fed-Ex employee, allegedly threw a sex party after claiming he was in town for a wedding. According to flyers found online, the party organizer charged $20 per person before 1 a.m. and $25 after that.
Teman came back five and a half hours after giving David the key to find 18 men in velvet track suits and pornographic photos scattered all over his apartment. His white couch was destroyed by stains, and other furniture had been dumped in the back alley of his building.
The debacle caused Teman’s landlordto sue him in housing court, Teman said.
The case was dropped, but Teman’s name — like hundreds of thousands named in New York housing court cases every year — ended up in a database of purportedly risky rentersthat landlords pay to access.
Teman was evicted from his $2,500-a-month apartment in January, and now no broker will represent him, he said. One building management company even refused his offer to pay the entire year up front, he said.
Airbnb spokesman Jakob Kerr said the company “took immediate action to find Ari a safe place to stay and reimbursed him” over a year ago, and the man who rented his space was “permanently removed from our community.”
Teman said he’s since moved between different “rundown, sketchy” sublets and random hotel rooms across the city. He’s currently staying at the Upper West Side apartment of his cousin’s cousin until June 1, but it’s always hard to keep track of his current address.
“I house-sat a rabbit for a good week and a half just to have a place to stay,” Teman said. “A rodent has more housing stability than me!”
Carter, 32, told the Daily News that he rented the place for a relative who was coming from out of town and was allowed to have people over.
“The whole concept of this was a fabricated story for him to use his 15 minutes of fame,” Carter, of Brooklyn, said. “The only thing I have to say is, good luck and enjoy your karma.”
Carter said he’s an event planner, but not for sex parties, and claimed a flyer posted online was fake.
If there was actual damage to the apartment, Carter said he would have been arrested when police were called to the scene, but he was not.
Teman said Carter’s claims are “easily disproven.”
Right after the incident, Teman said the damage cost $67,000. Airbnb paid for some of it, but Teman declined to say how much.
While the company covered the “minute” cost of his destroyed furniture, the “epic damage” of not having a place to live is “stratospherically more,” Teman said.
Teman said he’s had to pay up to $1,000 more per month for corporate sublets and often crashes at the office of his tech startup, Friend or Fraud. Without the office, he’d lead a “nomadic suitcase dweller” lifestyle, he said.
Brokers have told him his best chance of finding an apartment is to buy one, but there’s little chance a co-op board would accept him because Google searches show his name connected to the sex party, he said.
Teman said he’s brought another case against his former landlord, but the legal process could take years.
He took to the blogging site Tumblr on Tuesday to get Airbnb’s attention “to fix this” and to warn potential tenants renting out places on the site that it will “abandon” them if things go wrong.
“I hope that Airbnb makes it right and takes care of the housing situation so I’m not looking for a new apartment every one to six weeks,” Teman said.
ON A MOBILE DEVICE? WATCH THE VIDEO HERE.
