And these are from form leases, with boilerplate language that is available on the internet. I have seen dozens - and that is not an exaggeration - dozens of leases in the past year alone with a clause that the landlord has to approve a female tenant’s overnight guests. I had a landlord include in a lease a clause demanding daily lap dances.

There’s this idea that maybe what was unusual was that the landlord put it in the lease - well, that’s not unusual either.

I wish I could say that this was an outlier, but it’s not. You say Allan Rothstein’s behavior is not unique. Unfortunately, she predicts that this kind of behavior will only get worse as our current housing crisis continues. Ring spoke at length about her experience working with tenants who are, in fact, routinely subject to sexual intimidation and harassment of the kind Rothstein is accused of, and what actually happens to landlords who admit this behavior in court. “My first reaction was, ‘What took them so long?’ Because I see this on a regular basis,” says Sheryl Ring, a lawyer who works with low-income tenants and homeowners in the Chicago area. But ask a tenant-rights attorney and you get a different response. The general reaction to the lawsuit has mostly been focused on how batshit and outrageous Rothstein’s behavior was. He had even banned her from using “intoxicants” in a bizarre list including “sea cucumber, strawberries, lobster, dark chocolate, Cocaine,” and “LSD.” The tenant was a formerly homeless single mom of five in Las Vegas using a Section 8 housing voucher after she had refused Rothstein a hand job, he added a stipulation in her lease that she was signing over “Direct Consent for Sexual Intercourse and/or Fellatio or Cunnilingus” for five years, as well as agreeing not to have a partner that was “larger, meaner, and more physically aggressive” than Rothstein. The news item went as follows: Allan Rothstein, a Las Vegas–area broker, manager, and landlord, was being sued in federal court for including a “sexual intercourse” clause in a tenant’s lease. Last week, a bad landlord story to rule all bad landlords went viral on multiple news outlets, with content so appalling and creepy I have not been able to shake off accompanying photos of said bad landlord (technically a property manager in this case) grinning in an orange Hawaiian shirt.

Apartment lease fineprint