february1–14, 2021 | newyork 81was using the custody fight in New York to
avoid paying her. (She also told him that
she thought Klein was conspiring with her
ex-girlfriend, whom she claimed Klein was
now seeing.) “I don’t know if what she
told me is the truth,” Settineri reflects.
“I only know that I saw there was a mom
fighting to be a mom under some shitty
circumstances.”
Klein told police that the ex-spouses had
a run-in on the night of May 31, when he
drove Happy to New York from Pittsburgh.
He said Gladstone grabbed his arm during
an argument, then followed him “around
the entire West Village” with Lily in tow. It
might explain why, five days later, she
showed up at Russell’s doorstep with the
dog. She had texted Russell that night at
3 a.m. asking if they could be let in early,
stating that Lily was asleep on her lap.
Russell and Bajada served Gladstone
another 30-day notice on October 22, and
at the end of November, Russell says,
Gladstone told her that Lily had hand-
foot-and-mouth disease; Gladstone told
her lawyer in her criminal case that Lily
had pneumonia. Russell filed a holdover
petition, used to evict a tenant who stays
beyond the terms of a lease, but the court
date was postponed so that Gladstone
could find a lawyer. On January 30, 2020,
at the courthouse in Manhattan, a small
miracle occurred: Gladstone actually
signed an agreement saying that she
would leave by March 31, 2020. Russell’s
lawyer had persuasively argued to Glad-
stone that he could win against her in
court and even get damages. Russell was
overjoyed, texting friends and Bajada.
Thinking ahead, they sought and were
granted a warrant of eviction in case
Gladstone tried to stay.
It was just in time. Russell had been laid
off in October; she and Bajada were both
living off her unemployment assistance.
They’d had no rental income for seven
months. In the apartment, Russell stayed
up late and woke up late. She had taken to
recording nearly every interaction she had
with Gladstone, hundreds of hours of foot-
age, with Gladstone recording her back in
a bizarre iPhone standoff. With news of
the coronavirus, Gladstone had taken to
spraying chemical cleaners in the air—
Russell made three complaints at the 6th
Precinct about Gladstone following her
into the kitchen and, under the auspices of
cleaning, spraying close to her food. She
started spraying into the crack between
the door and the frame of Russell’s room
while she was inside. Once, Gladstone
sprayed her in the back, leaving bleachy
streaks on her sweater.
As the pandemic’s first wave crested over
New York, Governor Cuomo issued a stateexecutive order on March 20, halting all
eviction proceedings 11 days before mar-
shals would have knocked on Russell’s door.By the summer of 2020, Russell
had developed a routine. Like the
rest of the city, she had been or-
dered to stay home, only her
home was also occupied by a tenant who
refused to be evicted, her 12-year-old,
and two dogs. She was essentially living
out of her bedroom and had become a de
facto hoarder: Like a loony kind of bazaar,
every inch of the space was cluttered with
disparate items—her television, her expen-
sive kitchen-knife set, a small fridge—
with a tiny patch on the floor for Abby,
her poodle. To cope, Russell spent hours
outdoors. And she found a decent public
bathroom at the Wendy’s on 14th Street.
She would walk all the way to Wall Street
and back and then sit on the stoops of
friends’ apartments. She hung out in the
West Village Houses’ laundry room,
where she would take “farmer showers.” It
was better than the first few months of the
pandemic, when Russell wandered a
frigid, empty downtown, pushing Abby,
who had injured her leg, around in a
carriage. Back on Barrow Street, Gladstone
still had the colored lights she’d put up for
Christmas nailed to the wall. She was
getting copies of The New Yorker.
A reprieve came in July, when Glad-
stone and Lily suddenly left for 17 days.
Cautiously, Russell returned to her apart-
ment. She made dinner. She watched Hot
in Cleveland on her TV, which she brought
back into the living room, while sitting on
the couch. It had been a year since Glad-
stone had told her that her life felt like a
crazy novel. Maybe Russell’s crazy novel
was over. Maybe Bajada could come back
from Kiev, where she was helping out in a
cousin’s market in exchange for food.
They had not been able to afford a lawyer
since March, so Russell found an attorney,
Matt Porges, through a housing clinic. She
changed her locks and left a note for Glad-
stone to call Porges’s number if and when
she returned. On the 17th day, Porges got
the call. Gladstone told him she and Lily
were never planning on leaving the apart-
ment. It was their home.
Out walking in the Village, Russell broke
down. For the first time, she let go of her
obsession with following the rules: She
would rather fight the lockout in court, she
told Porges, than let them in. A neighbor
saw Gladstone in the hallway, her daughter
next to her, trying to pick the lock one night.
After that, Gladstone filed an illegal lockout
case, which sent the police to Russell’s
apartment the night before their hearing.
In pretrial negotiations, Gladstone saidTherevelationsdidnotsurpriseBajada.
“Heidiis moretrustingthanme,” shesays.
Bajadaandhermotherhadbeenleft home-
less duringthe Khrushchevera ofthe
USSR,aftersevenfamilieswereforcibly
movedintotheirapartment.Currently, the
situationat 129Barrowisnoteventhe
worst of Bajada’shousingcrises.Whileallof
this washappeningwithGladstoneinNew
York, BajadawasinKiev—herelderly
motherhadbeenmurderedina dispute
over herapartmentbyanotherfamilythat
wastryingtotake possessionofit.
Russellwentdowntothe6thPrecinctto
inform the NYPD that Gladstone was
living in her home. On October 18, 2019,
officers arrested Gladstone for violating
her ex-girlfriend’s restraining order. Her
ex had already reported to police that
she had seen Gladstone skulking around
her apartment on four occasions. Cops had
been looking for Gladstone since May.
When Gladstone was arrested, Russell
got a call from a faculty member at Lily’s
current middle school to tell her they had
arranged for the child to stay with another
parent; Russell was left with Happy the
dog. At this point, Jens Klein didn’t even
know where Gladstone and his daughter
had been living. The school only had the
address on Christopher Street. During a
court-ordered investigation back in March
2019, Klein told the Administration for
Children’s Services that Gladstone had
never really had a permanent address for
Lily; he would call Lily and discover she and
her mother had been sitting “all night in a
Starbucks.” Gladstone told the ACS agents
that she and Lily were living in Brooklyn
on Frost Street with a man named Nory
Settineri. Though a school official reported
that Lily’s attendance was unsatisfactory,
and her grandparents—Gladstone’s mother
and stepfather—reported they were
concerned for her well-being, Children’s
Services dismissed Klein’s petition.
Settineri said he took in Gladstone
because he could sympathize with her
plight—he is in the middle of his own
custody case. Gladstone told him that
Klein owed her hundreds of thousands of
dollars from the film company, which, she
claimed, they were partners in, and that he
The
Nightmare
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