THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020 ST 7Cheryl Berman-Schechter, 50, has been go-
ing to Montauk, the hamlet on the eastern
tip of Long Island, since the early 1990s.
Back then it was a fishing village, with a mix
of middle- and working-class residents. She
and her husband, Matthew Schechter,
bought property there in 2008. When Ms.
Berman-Schechter chooses tenants, she
hopes to find people who respect the place’s
history.
“I want people that Montauk matters to,”
Ms. Berman-Schechter, 50, said in a recent
phone interview from Colombia, where she
and Mr. Schechter, the financial officer at an
audio equipment website, have lived since
2016.
This summer, Ms. Berman-Schechter
rented the house to a wellness professional
and aspirational influencer from the New
York area named Marisa Hochberg. Ms.
Hochberg, 32, has professed a lifelong devo-
tion to Montauk — a setting both salubrious
and glamorous, ideal for someone develop-
ing a personal brand in the lifestyle field.
“Spending youthful summers at my fam-
ily home in Montauk is where I felt most se-
rene,” Ms. Hochberg wrote in an essay for
The Purist, a website founded by Cristina
Cuomo where Ms. Hochberg works as an
executive sales director, according to her
LinkedIn profile. (Calls to Ms. Cuomo, a
highly followed “wellness worshiper” also
devoted to the Hamptons, went unan-
swered.) She wrote that the End — a nick-
name for Montauk — “has this special aura
surrounding it — the water and the bucolic
setting of the lighthouse, the greenery and
the rich history. Whenever I arrived, I felt
like I had really escaped to a place where I
could be myself.” In an interview about
weight loss with Yahoo.com five years ago,
she said, “Montauk was, in some strange
way, like my support system.”
Ms. Hochberg’s focus on healthy living,
her stated aversion to drugs and alcohol
and her job at a local hot spot, the Surf
Lodge, convinced Ms. Berman-Schechter
that she would be an agreeable tenant.
In May, they signed a lease that ran from
June 1 to Aug. 8. Ms. Hochberg had asked to
stay the entire summer, said Ms. Berman-
Schechter, who replied that it wasn’t possi-
ble. In early August, she planned to give the
house over to family friends: college profes-
sors who rent it every summer.
Two weeks after moving in, Ms. Hoch-
berg messaged Ms. Berman-Schechter.
“This is probably a dumb question bc you
just built the house but you aren’t looking to
sell by any chance. I’ve fallen in love with it
haha — figured I’d ask!” The house was not
for sale.
On Instagram, where Ms. Hochberg pro-
motes products to her following of 12,000,
the hamlet had already become her back-
drop of choice. This summer, the Berman-
Schechters’ house became one of the idyllic
settings from which she posted endorse-
ments of acupuncture services, hair dryers
and tanner.
On June 12, Ms. Hochberg posted a pic-
ture of herself on Instagram standing under
a Japanese dogwood tree in the Berman-
Schechters’ garden. “Montauk mornings in
my new summer garden,” the caption read,
along with several hashtags including
#goodmorning and #myownhome.
Her stay was uneventful for the first sev-
eral weeks, with a key exception. On June
15, when it came time for her to pay the
$14,450 that constituted the second half of
her rent, she did not pay, the Berman-
Schechters said in multiple court filings.
Several days before Ms. Hochberg was
scheduled to move out, according to Ms.
Berman-Schechter, her father, who was
listed on the lease as an occupant of the
house, called and asked that his daughter
be able to stay. The landlord said no. On a
text message thread with both Hochbergs
after the call, she offered to help find Ms.
Hochberg somewhere else to live.
Ms. Hochberg’s tone changed.
“You’re going to kick an almost 91-year-
old man out in the middle of a global pan-
demic?” she texted. She added that she and
her father were protected by a law passed to
shield vulnerable tenants during the pan-
demic. Later she sent a New York Post arti-
cle about moneyed tenants who had taken
advantage of the law. (In a conversation
with The New York Times, Mr. Hochberg
played down his occupancy of the Berman-
Schechters’ place. “I think I slept there one
night,” he said. “I have my own place in
Montauk.”)
On Sept. 1, according to a court filing, Ms.
Hochberg hadn’t paid what she owed, and
hadn’t left the house. She posted a picture of
herself to Instagram that day, holding the
door of the Berman-Schechters’ outdoor
shower open. The caption read, “I’ve heard
September is the new August,” followed by
an upside-down smiling emoji.
‘It’s Happening All Over the Place’
The Berman-Schechters are far from the
only landlords who have had trouble getting
short-term tenants to pay rent or leave their
rentals during the pandemic. Tenant-pro-
tection laws passed by the State of New
York in order to shield the vulnerable both
before and during the pandemic have been
used as a cudgel by wealthy renters, as well
as those who wish to portray themselves
living in luxury.
“When the Legislature enacted this law,
I’m sure that they did not intend to protect
people in this way, renting units, houses in
the Hamptons, for tens of thousands of dol-
lars a month,” said Steven Kirkpatrick, a
partner at the Romer Debbas law firm in
Manhattan who specializes in housing law.
(Ms. Hochberg had agreed in May to pay
$31,750 for her stay in Montauk.)
Robert Marcincuk, of O’Shea, Marcincuk
and Bruyn in Southhampton, said he had 10
landlord clients with tenant woes there.
The tenants his clients were fighting “do
have money, they do have jobs, and they
choose not to pay the rent,” he said.
Christian Killoran, the president of Killo-
ran Law in Westhampton Beach, said he
has over half a dozen clients in the Hamp-tons in a situation similar to the Berman-
Schechters’.
“It’s happening all over the place,” Mr.
Killoran said. And people are talking. “Cer-
tainly landlords are and obviously tenants
are too because you’re seeing the prolifera-
tion of the strategy.”
The Tenant Safe Harbor Act, which Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo signed into law on June
30, extended pandemic-related protections
that the governor had already established,
making it difficult for landlords to obtain an
eviction order, no matter whom their tenant
might be. Tenant rights had already been
buttressed by a law passed the previous
year, the Housing Stability and Tenant Pro-
tection Act.
Judith Goldiner, the attorney-in-charge of
the Civil Law Reform Unit at the Legal Aid
Society, said that the laws would help many
people who were suffering in New York,
pointing to a recent survey that indicated
that 58 percent of Black renters, 57 percent
of Hispanic or Latino renters and 37 percent
of white renters in New York were unsure of
their ability to pay their October rent.
“Anytime you have a law, there’s going tobe some bad people who take advantage of
it, but there are so many thousands — may-
be millions in New York State — who will be
helped by the Safe Harbor Act,” she said,
emphasizing that the protection only ex-
tended to Jan. 1.
But during a summer like no other, cases
of wealthy squatters attracted public atten-
tion. In June, Air Mail reported that a
Hamptons Realtor, Jonathan Davis, had
trashed a property he had leased, and had
refused to leave. In a court filing, Mr. Da-
vis’s landlords, Giancarlo Bonagura and
Paula Rosado, accused him of overstaying
his lease because he believed that the ten-
ant laws passed during the pandemic would
leave them with no legal recourse.
Mr. Davis did not respond to to emails and
voice mail messages requesting comment.
A spokeswoman at his real estate firm, Nest
Seekers, declined to comment.
In August, The Post reported that a Man-
hattan developer and a former owner of the
Tunnel nightclub, Marco Ricotta, had
stopped paying rent on his Westhampton
vacation home. Mr. Killoran, who repre-
sented Mr. Ricotta’s landlord, said that the
case had been settled this week. Mr. Ricotta
did not respond to phone calls or text mes-
sages seeking comment.
Ms. Hochberg said in a text message that
her family has owned property in Montauk
for 35 years. (Ms. Hochberg’s father, a re-
tired liquor retailer, is on the board of direc-
tors for a high-rise called Montauk Manor,
where he also owns an apartment, a four-
minute drive from the Berman-Schechters’
home. He is also on the boards of a hospital
in Brooklyn and an Upper East Side syna-
gogue, and has long been involved in com-
munity revitalization, in the Ridgewood
neighborhood of Queens.)
Early in her career, Ms. Hochberg
worked on wellness events in the Hamptons
and Montauk for corporate clients. In 2017,
she began working as the partnerships and
wellness director at Surf Lodge, a nightclub
founded in 2007 by the Brazilian-born entre-
preneur Jayma Cardoso.
With celebrities including Jaden Smith,
Leonardo DiCaprio, Taylor Swift, Khloe
Kardashian and Tiffany Trump among its
customers, Surf Lodge has brought the glitz
(and noise) of the neighboring Hamptons to
The End. Ms. Hochberg helped introduce
daytime wellness programming to offset
the nighttime bacchanals.
“She’s a good person at work, she’s ex-
tremely dedicated,” Ms. Cardoso said of Ms.
Hochberg.
The two women spoke about plans to ex-
pand Surf Lodge’s wellness programming
for an article published in The Post on Sept.- By that point, court records show, Ms.
Hochberg was already embroiled in a legal
battle with the Berman-Schechters, who
found they had little leverage to remove her
from the property. After the Berman-
Schechters’ lawyer filed a petition asking a
court to compel Ms. Hochberg to leave the
house, Ms. Hochberg’s lawyer, Christopher
McGuire, used the 2019 tenant protection
act to argue for dismissal.
The Berman-Schechters’ lawyer, Brian
Lester, withdrew the initial suit, which had
been unsuccessful in prompting a settle-
ment, and filed another to seek possession
of the house and also to recover damages.
A spokeswoman at Mr. McGuire’s office
said this week that he was no longer repre-
senting Ms. Hochberg.
Chatter on the Beach
As well as citing her father’s health, Ms.
Hochberg told her landlords that she was indire financial straits after being laid off
from Surf Lodge. (Ms. Cardoso confirmed
that Ms. Hochberg was laid off midway
through the summer, along with about a
hundred others.) Ms. Hochberg also sug-
gested that she had likely become infected
with Covid-19 while working an event at
the Lodge in August as a contractor, after
having been laid off.
“I don’t think new tenants would want a
Covid-infested house?” she wrote in an
email on Aug. 7. Ms. Cardoso said that after
a Covid-19 scare at Surf Lodge that month,
Ms. Hochberg had been tested twice, with
negative results.
Ms. Berman-Schechter had never be-
fore run into this kind of tenant trouble.
(When she and her husband bought the
property, Ms. Berman-Schechter was
working as a digital product manager for
The Times, a role on the business side of
the organization. She left in 2011.) She did
not run a background check that could
have revealed an eviction case filed
against Ms. Hochberg by River Tower
Owner L.L.C., the corporation that owns
the Oriana, a luxury high-rise in Manhat-
tan. (That filing, from April 2019, indicated
that she owed the company $22,130.)
And when Ms. Hochberg did not pay in
June, Ms. Berman-Schechter was in the
midst of relocating from Bogotá, which
was almost entirely shut down because of
the coronavirus, to a farm an hour and a
half away, where her two sons could be out-
side. She did not aggressively pursue the
missing rent.
“I honestly don’t have a great answer,”
Ms. Berman-Schechter said when asked
why she was not more concerned then.
“Trust me, my husband has asked me the
same thing.”
As the conflict between Ms. Hochberg
and the Berman-Schechters intensified,
people stared to gossip.
Ms. Cardoso was asked about the dis-
pute, on the beach and at the hardware
store, she said. Ever-protective of her es-
tablishment’s relationship with locals, she
called Ms. Berman-Schechter to find out
what was going on. Then she asked Ms.
Hochberg. “She wanted this to be a person-
al matter and not have me involved, which
I totally respect,” Ms. Cardoso said. “It is
her life, her matter. Surf Lodge has nothing
to do with it.”
Ms. Cardoso also said that Ms. Hoch-
berg’s behavior was out of character. “I’m
very surprised that this happened,” she
said.
The Berman-Schechters say they made
multiple attempts to settle with Ms. Hoch-
berg, to no avail. When on Yom Kippur, the
solemn Jewish holiday of repentance, Mr.
Hochberg had a letter published on his
synagogue’s website about the importance
of charity, Mr. Schechter made an Insta-
gram account with the handle @lying-
marissa using an image of Ms. Hochberg
as the profile picture and misspelling her
name. He then quoted her father’s words
on one of Ms. Hochberg’s Instagram posts.
(He said that he took the account down af-
ter a day because he was concerned it was
“spurious.”)
“My daughter wants to sue them,” Mr.
Hochberg told The Times. “They put her
picture up and wrote all kinds of crazy
things.” He called the Berman-Schechters
“nasty” and “vengeful” and said that they
were trying to harass his family for money.
Ms. Hochberg did not initially respond
when The Times contacted her by phone
and email. Through an intermediary, she
told the Berman-Schechters that she
would move out on Oct. 12.
It was cold and rainy in Montauk that
day. Off the main drag, deer roamed the
streets, unperturbed by the occasional car.
Outside the Berman-Schechters’ house,
shortly after noon, a purple moving van
was loaded up. Within an hour, it was gone.
Later that day, Ms. Hochberg responded
to The Times, calling the story “fake news.”
She did not answer follow-up questions
about her extended summer.
The Berman-Schechters said that after-
noon that they had gotten their key back,
but that they still hadn’t been paid. Also
that afternoon, a representative of the
property group that manages the Oriana,
the Manhattan apartment building, said
that the group would not comment.
Though the eviction case against Ms.
Hochberg had been filed in 2019, the com-
pany was still in litigation against her,
seeking to reclaim possession of the Ori-
ana apartment.The Well-Off Make Tenant Protections Their Own
Wealthy renters are citing a
pandemic law when refusing
to leave East End properties.
By JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH
and EZRA MARCUS‘When the
Legislature
enacted this law,
I’m sure that
they did not
intend to protect
people in this
way, renting
units, houses in
the Hamptons,
for tens of
thousands of
dollars a month.’
Clockwise from top: deer
roaming property owned by
Cheryl Berman-Schechter
and her husband, Matthew;
the Surf Lodge, where
Marisa Hochberg worked as
a wellness consultant; Ms.
Hochberg; the Montauk
Downs Tennis Club, where
Ms. Hochberg took lessons
this summer.PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAT O’MALLEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESASTRID STAWIARZ/GETTY IMAGES.