A struggling Manhattan artist has gone to extreme lengths to stay in her rent-stabilized Tribeca loft — forging a letter to try to beat claims that she illegally rented the unit on Airbnb, court papers allege.
Downtown gallery fixture Eileen Hickey — whose artwork has appeared in films including 2010’s “Eat Pray Love” — says the owner of 460 Greenwich St. wants to boot her from her home of 40 years just so he can raise the $1,500-a-month rent.
“I have been and am being attacked and harassed mercilessly for the past three years, ONLY ABOUT allowing the wealthy landlord to charge market rates, up to five times as much,” Hickey says in Manhattan Supreme Court papers.
But landlord Robert Moskowitz counters that his tenant is a hypocrite.
“Ironically, it is the defendant who raised the rent, albeit illegally. She charged her hotel guest five times what she pays in rent,” Moskowitz’s attorney, Carl Peluso, says in filings.
And now, a year and a half after he first sued Hickey, Peluso says a forged letter is the damning evidence he needs to evict her.
In the October 2015 letter, Adam Berman, an executive director at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, affirms that Hickey was in the pad “except for vacations and medical appointments” during his stay in 2012.
But an e-mail from a Haas dean confirms that Berman “did not send the attached letter.” And in court papers, Hickey admits to forging the document.