Notorious SF landlord slapped with $3.5 million judgment for wrongful eviction

Left to right: Marta Mendoza, Dale Duncan and the couple’s attorneys, Steven McDonald and Ariel Gershon, who announced Friday, Oct. 27, 2017, a $3.5 million jury verdict against the Duncans’ former landlord. less Left to right: Marta Mendoza, Dale Duncan and the couple’s attorneys, Steven McDonald and Ariel Gershon, who announced Friday, Oct. 27, 2017, a $3.5 million jury verdict against the Duncans’ former ... more Photo: Dominic Fracassa Photo: Dominic Fracassa Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Notorious SF landlord slapped with $3.5 million judgment for wrongful eviction 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

A notorious San Francisco landlord, who has repeatedly come under fire for harassing and illegally evicting tenants, has been slapped with a $3.5 million judgment after a jury found her guilty of ousting a family from its home of 21 years to rent the unit at a higher price.

A jury this month found that Anne Kihagi violated the law when she booted Dale Duncan, his wife, Marta Mendoza, and their then-6-year-old daughter from their home on Hill Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. The judgment is the largest in a single-unit landlord-tenant case not involving personal injury claims in the nation, attorneys for the family said Friday

Kihagi, the family said, evicted them after saying that her sister, Christina Mwangi, would be occupying the unit. In San Francisco, landlords can legally evict tenants if they or a family member plans to move in. But the family sued last year, saying the owner move-in was a sham, and that Kihagi instead intended to rent the unit out at a market-rate price. At the time, the family was paying about $1,300 per month for its rent-controlled unit.

“The jury determined that (Mwangi) never moved in and never intended to move in,” Steven McDonald, an attorney for the family, said at a news conference Friday.

Shortly after Kihagi bought the five-unit Hill Street building in 2014, McDonald said, she took a number of bewildering actions aimed at making life difficult for all of her rent-controlled tenants.

“At one point, all of a sudden, she reduced garbage services by half without telling tenants. She would shut off electricity in common areas, and she would retaliate if (tenants) complained. She wouldn’t call them back when repairs were needed,” he said.

Mendoza said she and her family are relieved to be through the ordeal, but she misses the home she was forced out of.

“Going to trial was really hard for me and Dale and our daughter,” she said.

A San Francisco Superior Court jury awarded the family $1.17 million in damages this month after a 4½-week trial, but Superior Court Judge Andrew Y.S. Cheng tripled that amount last week. Under San Francisco law, to make landlord-tenant cases more attractive to attorneys, judges can triple the amount of damages awarded to victims whose rights have been violated under the city’s rent ordinance.

McDonald said his firm would be filing motions to recoup about $500,000 in attorneys’ fees from Kihagi. His firm is also readying three additional cases for trial on behalf of four other Kihagi tenants.

Richard Diestal, an attorney for Kihagi, did not respond to requests for comment.

The San Francisco city attorney’s office won a sweeping judgment against Kihagi in May after filing a lawsuit against her in June 2015, saying she waged “a war of harassment, intimidation, and retaliation” against her rent-controlled tenants in several properties she owns in the city to illegally evict them.

“She forced one tenant out of his longtime home as he battled terminal cancer,” City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement in May. “That breathtaking cruelty was matched only by her contempt for the law.”

In that case, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Angela Bradstreet ruled in a scathing, 154-page ruling that Kihagi had committed “outrageous, unlawful and fraudulent violations that were specifically targeted against often long-term tenants who were protected by San Francisco’s rent-control laws.”

Bradstreet initially ordered Kihagi to pay the city $2.7 million in damages, but since then, with the addition of legal fees and other costs, that figure has doubled to $5.46 million. Kihagi has appealed that judgment.

According to the city attorney’s office, Kihagi began buying up real estate in San Francisco in 2013. Today, she and her sisters oversee at least 11 properties across the city.

“The harm that can be done to people just to monetize their units, just to squeeze a little more money out of them, it’s pretty demonizing,” Duncan said. “I hope this sends a message to other landlords.”

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa