Woman’s 3-Year Legal Battle and $200K Expense Ends in Tears Over Bloody Mess Left by LA Tenant

When Alison Weinsweig, 67, rented out her fancy Westwood apartment in 2020, she had no idea that it would become a problem that would last for almost three years and cost her more than $200,000.

This caused her “strain on many levels,” she told Business Insider.

“I felt terribly violated,” she said. “I thought I would never get him out.” I believed I would be with him forever.

Weinsweig finally got to her property in April, but it was in such a strange state of chaos that she broke down in tears.

The pictures that were sent to BI seem to show bloody floors, cracked countertops, and, most frighteningly, a life-sized human dummy.

Now she has to pick up the pieces and pay thousands of dollars for repairs, according to figures seen by BI. This is on top of the more than $170,000 she said she had already lost in rent.

Weinsweig, a real estate broker who is mostly retired, bought the two-bedroom apartment on Wilshire Boulevard in 2004 and lived there for ten years before moving to Pennsylvania to be with her sick mother.

She had rented it out to two other people without any problems, so she thought Ramin Kohanim would be the same.

“He seemed like a good tenant,” she said, adding that the rental service had checked him out and seen that he had a Social Security number, good credit, and a bank account with a lot of money in it.

She said that even if there were “red flags,” she probably wouldn’t have seen them because she was too focused on her mom getting better.

She said that Kohanim’s first year as a renter wasn’t too bad, even though he did pay some bills late. Things got messy after he signed on for a second year in July 2021.

Wiensweig says, “He paid the first month and never paid anything else.”

BI asked Kohanim and his lawyer for a reply, but they didn’t answer.

Weinsweig says she hasn’t gotten her rent for months, even though she was given many reasons. In January 2022, she went to court to get it back.

BI looked at some legal papers and found that the tenant was protected by the COVID-19 Tenant Relief Act. This law stopped people who were having a hard time because of the pandemic from being evicted for not paying their rent.

Weinsweig got a small amount of the rent money that Kohanim had lost after his application for rental aid was approved. The case was then automatically dropped that summer.

Later that same year, Weinsweig filed another case, this time to get back the property and get paid for the damage. However, things did not go as planned.

She finally hired her first lawyer again after firing her first one and waiting for LA County’s eviction moratorium to end in March 2023.

It would take months of talks before the two sides could come to an agreement, but Kohanim had to leave by April of this year because of a ruling made in November 2023.

BI looked at legal papers that showed Weinsweig agreed to pay the tenant $20,000. Half of that amount was to be held in trust and would only be paid out after the renter had left the property and followed the rules.

Even though Weinsweig thought this was wrong, she thought it would make things end.

Even though Kohanim moved out in April, Weinsweig says that the keys and fob have still not been returned. But that wasn’t the worst thing about it for her.

A record that BI looked at shows that Weinsweig told the court on May 23 at a meeting in the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles that the apartment was left in “absolutely deplorable” condition.

When she got to the house, she saw trash and cigarette burns everywhere, as well as what looked like blood on the bedroom and bathroom floors, she told BI and the court.

Pictures that were given to BI and the court seem to show the damage.

Images sent to BI also seem to show a life-sized dummy on the bathroom floor, next to zip-tie bags. We don’t know why they were there.

Weinsweig gave BI quotes from contractors that show the cost of fixes could be more than $24,000.

During the meeting, Kohanim admitted that there was “discharge” on a mattress. However, he and his lawyer said that the other damage was just normal “wear and tear.”

During the meeting, the defense didn’t say anything to suggest that the pictures were fake or not real.

His lawyer told the judge that Kohanim wasn’t the “best tenant in the world” or the cleanest, but he didn’t believe that the apartment had been destroyed on purpose.

However, the judge said, “80 square feet of blood is not normal wear and tear.”

He told them to give Weinsweig back the $10,000 that was being held and to open the case.

She said she wanted the case to be made public so that others could learn about what she went through. That’s a small win for her that she wants to hold on to.

“When they opened the seal, I felt justified because not only had I been through all of these wrongs… “I had to keep it quiet,” she said, adding, “This can’t be ignored.”

Source: Business Insider