Chicago’s Horizon Realty Group Sues Former Tenant Over a Tweet

From deep in the “how to royally ruin your reputation via social media” files comes this gem:

How much damage can a Tweet do? According to property management company Horizon Realty, $50,000 worth.

That’s the size of the lawsuit against one of its former tenants on Monday, in response to a Tweet about one of their Chicago apartments. Amanda Bonnen was staying an apartment at 4242 N. Sheridan.  According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Bonnen’s Tweet on May 12 read, in part:

“Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”

The Tweet, posted under the user name @abonnen, was the reason for the libel lawsuit filed at Cook County Circuit Court, seeking $50,000 in damages. And although the Tweet and username are now deleted, accessing the account via Google’s cache shows it has around 20 followers. While the numbers could have dropped since deletion, it doesn’t appear the message would have travelled far. @abonnen wasn’t a particularly heavy Twitter user, either – she posted somewhere between 1 and 5 tweets per day and often didn’t post for 2 or 3 days.

Horizon’s Jeffrey Michael is quoted in the Sun-Times:

“The statements are obviously false, and it’s our intention to prove that”, adding that Horizon has a good reputation to protect. Bonnen wasn’t contacted before the suit was filed or asked to remove the Tweet, he said: “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization”.

A sue first, ask questions later kind of organization?  That’s special.  We’ll be remembering that one for a long time, Mr. Michael.

But we’re not through!  Later today, Michael releases another statement, expertly prepared by his PR agency:

The response to our libel lawsuit has been tremendous. We would like to take this opportunity to clarify some confusion concerning the circumstances surrounding our lawsuit against Amanda Bonnen.

I would first like to take this opportunity to apologize for tongue and cheek comments that were made previously regarding our approach to litigation. This statement is not in line with our philosophy towards property management and was taken out of context.

I need to set the record straight on a number of issues.
The facts that gave rise to this Twitter lawsuit were discovered in the course of due diligence relating to a class-action lawsuit first filed by Ms. Bonnen relating to alleged Chicago Residential Landlord Tenant Ordinance (RLTO) violations. It is our position that this lawsuit is completely baseless and was waged merely as a pretext to address an underlying disagreement that Ms. Bonnen had with regards to her apartment . . . .

We look forward to presenting our side of this matter before the court and putting the unfounded accusations of a single, former tenant behind us so we can focus on continuing to serve our more than 1,500 existing tenants throughout the Chicagoland area.

A copy of the actual lawsuit is available for download here:  Twitter Lawsuit

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