“Landlord Lives Matter” Protest Against Tenant May Have Been Illegal

Video still from Dira TV (fair use)

By Katie Wilson

Buckle up, it’s time for another sensational “nightmare tenant” story whipped up by right-wing media personalities. Ari Hoffman and Jonathan Choe first broadcast Bellevue landlord Jaskaran Singh Sarao’s sob story last November.

“While my tenant enjoys a relaxed lifestyle, buys new cars, and celebrates [with] barbecues, I continue to struggle to pay my bills and double mortgages,” Sarao told Hoffman.

This month, they apparently decided it was time for an escalation. Sarao (or an associate) turned to Nextdoor to promote a protest outside the home where his tenant, Sang Kim, lives with his wife and four children, saying that he’d been “suffering tremendously” and inviting “City council, Senators, and other community leaders … to join our neighbor to protest against non paying renters who refuse to vacate property despite an eviction order.”

And join they did. Bellevue Councilmember Jared Nieuwenhuis and Redmond Councilmember Steve Fields spoke at the rally, alongside Republican Party officials and notorious Seattle landlord Carl Haglund. At one point the crowd of between 50 and 100 broke into a chant: “No Pay, No Stay!” One participant held a “Landlord Lives Matter” sign; another sign reading “Serial Squatter Lives Here” was placed in the yard. After the speaker program, things began to get rowdy. A group, including Choe, banged on the tenant’s door until Bellevue Police yelled “Hey, we're not doing that!" and ushered them back to the sidewalk.

Many will find the spectacle of a landlord calling a rally outside his tenant’s home absurd and gross, regardless of the details of the situation. Protesting at a residence generally raises tricky issues of ethics and legality. When the target is a public figure whose position and power allow them to ignore public protests, this may be the only way to (quite literally) bring home the harm their actions cause. A tenant in the middle of eviction proceedings and at risk of becoming homeless  is clearly a different case. Actions aiming to drive people out of a community have a much uglier history.

Of course, the absurdity is part of the point. We’re supposed to find it shocking that a landlord would need to resort to such a tactic to shake loose a “deadbeat tenant,” just as we were supposed to find it shocking that landlord Jason Roth was reduced to sleeping in his van and eating discount meat. But, as with that story, there’s more to this one than first meets the eye.

Who is “mom and pop” landlord Jaskaran Singh Sarao, who told Hoffman last fall both that he “lost [his] job in the summer” and that he “works two jobs to support [his] family and the tenant’s family”?

In addition to his own $1.3 million home not far away, Sarao owns at least one other property under his own name, a $1.1 million house two doors down from the tenant’s address.

The rental is actually owned by a matryoshka-like chain of LLCs, the last of which lists a person named Gaganjit Singh Jeji as its sole governor on the Washington Secretary of State’s website. If Sarao is indeed the owner, it’s likely that he’s named as such in the property’s operating agreement, which is not a public document. (I learned about this arrangement in the aftermath of the Roth story, and it’s part of what makes property ownership in Washington state so opaque—one of many reasons why it’s a bad idea to try to exempt “small landlords” from renter protection laws.)

These or other subsidiary LLCs own one other rental property (a duplex) and have been party to at least three multi-million dollar property purchase-and-sales in the past few years, two of them demo-and-rebuilds and one a straight flip. Sarao is listed as a governor of one of these LLCs, now dissolved, that sold one of these properties for $3.7 million in 2022. Jeji and Sarao also co-govern three more active LLCs that last reported owning property in 2020, 2018, and 2017.

The extent of Sarao’s financial interests in or profits from all this real estate activity is not a matter of public record. But this history at least suggests that we should take the struggling small landlord schtick with a grain of salt.

Sarao is also, as Christopher Randels noted on Twitter, a member of the Bellevue Human Services Commission, having been recommended by then-Deputy Mayor (and now protest attendee) Nieuwenhuis in 2022. Among other duties, the commission reviews applications from human service providers—including nonprofits working to address homelessness and housing insecurity—and makes funding recommendations to the council. Whether leading a protest outside a distressed renter’s home is appropriate conduct for someone in this position would make an interesting topic of discussion at the commission’s next meeting on April 2.

And who is “nightmare tenant” Sang Kim? 

Kim has lived at the property with his wife and four children since mid-2022. He says he worked in procurement and contracting until his employer downsized near the end of that year, after a national pandemic task force that it had been part of was dissolved. “I’m still waiting for a delayed settlement from an incomplete contract I was hired to do,” he said, leaving him struggling to pay rent.

Kim received pandemic rental assistance through the Housing Justice Project, covering his family’s rent from October 2022 through May 2023. He hasn’t been able to pay since, and according to Sarao’s Nextdoor post now owes $45,000 in unpaid rent. Kim said that figure sounds about right.

Last fall, Sarao arrived at his door, accompanied by a camera-wielding Jonathan Choe. Choe posted the resulting video on Twitter with the headline “RENTER FROM HELL,” naming Sang Kim and stating the landlord’s claim that he is a “Con Man who is milking the ‘broken system’ that unfairly favors renters over mom and pop landlords.”

The video “circulated all around my kids’ school,” Kim said. “Two of his kids go to the same school as my two kids. My kids were bullied online and offline with that video.”

Ironically, he says the publicity made it much harder for him to leave the rental property.

“I’m trying to keep the kids in the same school,” Kim said. “The video made it difficult for me to find a new place to move, let alone get a job locally. I went to a job interview and the guy said ‘Aren’t you the guy in the video?’ and I had to just kind of walk out. It did nothing but benefit Jonathan Choe’s story, it didn’t benefit the landlord. It prolonged the process.”

When PubliCola requested comment from Choe, he responded by posting repeatedly on Twitter/X about the owner of PubliCola, Erica C. Barnett. He did not respond to our questions.

Sarao and his media amplifiers are outraged at the slow pace of the eviction proceedings. Sarao filed the current case in January and a hearing is scheduled for April 5. King County Superior Court is indeed moving more slowly than usual, but that’s because the court is dealing with an avalanche of evictions.

“Not just in King County but across the country, evictions are hitting record numbers, so there is a backlog,” says Edmund Witter, senior managing attorney of the King County Bar Association's Housing Justice Project, which is representing Kim. In November 2023, monthly eviction filings in King County climbed to nearly double the 2019, pre-pandemic numbers, and they’ve stayed significantly above that baseline since.

Kim says the landlord and his lawyers have only themselves to blame if things are moving slowly. “It’s not a broken system, it’s their broken approach to it,” he said. “They didn’t want to take the proper steps or give a fair chance to negotiate a repayment plan. They were cutting corners to get it done as soon as possible, and that’s why we got to this point.”

Sarao did not respond to my request for an interview.

Back to the protest outside Kim’s home. Whether you think it was appalling or justified, it may have been illegal.

Bellevue resident Bennett Haselton heard about the planned protest from Choe’s Twitter announcement. He showed up and recorded 90 minutes of the event on his GoPro. In the video, Haselton asks multiple participants the same question: “Why it wasn't a violation of the anti-doxxing law for the landlord to organize this rally.”

The new law, RCW 4.24.792, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2023. Among other things, it prohibits the publication of an individual’s home address with “reckless disregard for the risk” that this “will be used to harm the individual whose information is published” or if it causes “mental anguish” or “substantial life disruption.”

Kim is now dealing with the aftermath of the protest. “It’s not easy,” he said. “Now I have people calling anonymously, using nasty language and hanging up. Most people who attended the protest weren’t even from the neighborhood.”

“If they wanted to have a rally for landlords’ rights, they could have just as easily had it at a neighborhood park,” Haselton said. “Having it in front of the tenant's house serves no purpose except harassment.”

Or, if they wanted a location appropriate to their theme, they could have rallied outside the King County Courthouse in Seattle, where eviction cases are heard in superior court.

The protest also came close to violating an anti-harassment protection order that Kim obtained when he got wind of the plans. Kim says the judge promised to tell the Bellevue Police Department to expedite it, but the paperwork wasn’t delivered until the crowd was already disbanding. Sarao did know the order was coming, according to Kim, because he’d texted him a copy of it the day before.

The specter of “vigilante justice” by landlords, eagerly raised by Choe, has a long history. “It gave rise to one of the first landlord-tenant laws in the 1300s, when King Richard II prohibited landlords from taking the law into their own hands,” Witter said. Centuries later, Washington’s laws on forcible entry and detainer are interpreted to prohibit landlords from using menace, intimidation, or force to oust a tenant or occupant of a property, regardless of that person’s right to be there. 

Of Sarao’s protest, Witter said, “this feels like a slide” away from the rule of law. Sarao and Choe now appear to be planning a second protest at the house.

As much as last weekend’s events were painful for him and his family, Kim says that he feels sorry for the landlord, too.

“To Jonathan [Choe] it might be excitement, but as far as me and the landlord, nobody won. Jonathan was running around trying to escalate the situation, provoking the police, pounding on the door and trying to get other people to do the same. It was practically a show. It wasn’t for the benefit of anybody. Jonathan got his story, that’s it.”