Equality for Flatbush‘s Fire Judge Adam Meyers Campaign
Fire Judge Adam Meyers Now! Adam Meyers Must Step Down!
To Sign the Petition: https://www.change.org/FireJudgeAdamMeyers
Pictures, Videos and Online Documentation are linked throughout this document
Summary
As part of Equality for Flatbush (E4F) on-going Housing Court Judge Accountability Campaign, we are demanding that The Honorable Judge Joseph Zayas, the Chief Administrative of New York Civil Courts fire Adam Meyers from his recent appointment as a Manhattan Housing Court judge, for Meyer’s anti-Black racist, misogynistic treatment and legal negligence of Black Caribbean women migrant tenants in Brooklyn , NY while he was the Director of Litigation at Communities Resist (CoRe).
Here is the 2/9/2024 Accountability Letter that Adam Meyers was forced to write to seven E4F’s tenant associations housed in twelve pre-war buildings after failing to file HP repair lawsuits from April 2022 to December 2023. Adam Meyers’ legal negligence caused thousands of tenants to continue to live in unsafe, unsanitary and dangerous conditions despite their desire to hold their landlords accountable. Included in E4F’s twelve buildings are survivors of the January 22, 2023 , fire at 3400 Snyder Ave, who Adam Meyers promised and failed to provide any legal support for or to hold Maxx Properties accountable after an electrical fire took the life of a 13-year old boy and displaced several families from the building.
Adam Meyers wasted the energy, time and resources of tenants at 700 Ocean, 699-711 Ocean, 2110 Westbury, 2100 Westbury Court, 3400 Snyder, 3500 Snyder, 282 E 35th, and 285 E 35th in Flatbush, Brooklyn & 748 St. Marks, 441 Brooklyn, 150 Lefferts in Crown Heights for close to two years. Only two of the seven tenant associations are currently organizing with Equality for Flatbush.
Equality for Flatbush’s founder and executive director Imani Keith Henry, stated that, “We are tired of the countless predatory attorneys who continue to profit and further their careers off the pain and suffering of New Yorkers, especially Black and Brown women, who are simply fighting to stop their own displacement. In the coming days, E4F will be releasing video testimonies and engage in political protest until Adam Meyers is fired or steps down from his judgeship.”
#FireAdamMeyersNow #AdamMeyersMustStepDown
Background & Charges Against Adam Meyers
Since 2016, Equality for Flatbush has been a proud community partner of the BIPOC legal professionals who founded Communities Resist (CoRe) in 2019. Unfortunately, since 2023, Equality for Flatbush has been engaged in accountability processes with CoRe’s leadership in regard to anti-Black racism and the failure of white members of their legal team to provide culturally competent, quality legal services to our majority Black migrant women tenants. We thank CoRe for its on-going efforts to rebuild trust and strengthen our organizational relationship.
On February 9, 2024, Adam Meyers, the former Director of Litigation of CoRe was forced to issue an apology letter to seven of E4F’s tenant associations for failing to file repair lawsuits against their landlords from April 2022 to December 2023. Meyers was then fired by the 441 Brooklyn Avenue Tenants Association, E4F’s oldest tenant association, on February 12th, because of a no vote of confidence that he would “fight for the Black tenants“ in the building.
On August 15, 2024, Adam Meyers was appointed as a new judge of Manhattan Housing Court. As part of Equality for Flatbush’s Housing Court Judge Accountability Campaign, E4F is calling for the Honorable Judge Joseph Zayas, Chief Administrative of New York Civil Courts to fire Adam Meyers for his anti-Black racist, misogynistic treatment and legal negligence against Black women tenants which includes:
- Holding the political belief that Black and Brown people are facing displacement in NYC “because they are poor” and that evictions are because of “class”. Adam Meyers admitted that he had not explored the history and impact of structural racism in the US as it related to his work as a housing attorney.
- Failing to return/ answer phone calls of Black tenants, while returning/ answering calls from white tenants in the same building.
- Speaking about “bonding” with white male tenants while describing Black women tenants in the same building as “difficult”.
- Publicly “laughing and joking” with white landlords and/or their attorneys at court in front of the Black tenants, leading tenants to report that “they did not trust“ or “feel comfortable“ with Adam Meyers as their attorney.
- Allowing the landlord’s lawyers and judges to “walk all over him” during legal proceedings, which led to tenants reporting that “Adam, did not fight for us in court “.
- Failing to return or answer E4F tenant leaders and organizers calls, emails or texts for several months at a time which delayed the scheduling of tenant meetings and potential court proceedings.
- Being overly concerned with “the law” and what was “winnable” or not versus the needs of the tenants to have justice and hold their landlords accountable.
- Demonstrating an unprofessional work performance and ethics.
- A. A Black woman tenant made it explicitly clear that because of her job, she did not want to be part of any public campaigns of the tenant association of her building. For that reason, E4F advised her to not be part of the HP action that was being organized. Unbeknownst to E4F, Adam Meyers added her to the lawsuit without the tenant’s or our organization’s consent. She called Adam Meyers several times before her name was removed from the court documents. As a result, the tenant stopped coming to tenant meetings and asked to be removed from E4F’s community email lists because of the trauma she endured.
- Gaslighting and behaving in a defensive manner when tenants’ concerns around his racist, sexist or distrustful behavior was reported to him.
- Behaving in white elitist and culturally disrespectful ways with Black Caribbean people. For example:
- Adam Meyers prioritized “speaking to tenants” about the law and answering individual questions. Many tenants reported that Adam Meyers strung them along when they called, but he did not provide them with any of the individual legal services he had promised them at meetings.
- Adam Meyers made disparaging remarks to E4F organizers and tenants if he believed there were “not enough” tenants at the meetings and was very vocal about how not having many tenants at the meetings “was not worth his time.” An example of this is when Adam Meyers saw a random book in the lobby of 441 Brooklyn Ave, picked it up and began reading it during the middle of a tenant association meeting while tenants were talking.
- Adam Meyers continuously insisted that there were “not enough” tenants to go forward with filing repair lawsuits against their landlords, even though there is no quantitative legal limit of how many tenants are needed to file a HP action in NYS.
- Adam Meyers promised our tenants and organizers that all HP repairs actions would be filed by the spring of 2023, in order for Equality for Flatbush to launch our Summer of War campaign. After our entire organization planned and promoted the campaign online, we could not go forward as planned because Adam Meyers did not file the HPs.
- Adam Meyers allowed all the legal documents for HP actions to lapse after six months, forcing organizers and tenants to re-do the HP legal retainer process over again in the fall/winter of 2023. In total E4F’s organizers and tenants went through three rounds of HP documentation from 2022-2023 for the majority of buildings assigned to Adam Meyers.
- Adam Meyers did not respect E4F’s values of “community lawyering”, or engage in any real self-examination of his own power and privilege as white middle-class cis hetero-normative man interacting with Black women, non-binary and trans people members and staff of Equality for Flatbush.
- Adam Meyers never attended any Equality for Flatbush’s community forums, fundraising events or ever accepted any social invitations from E4F staff members from 2018 – 2024. He also made no real connections or bonds with any E4F tenants or members.
Equality for Flatbush Housing Court Judge Accountability Campaign
In 2023, evictions in Brooklyn rose to 3,500 which is triple the amount of 2022. In 2017, when the NYS housing movement won better rent laws, the infamous Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) began suing the State over these “anti-landlord” laws. REBNY has also been targeting judges that they believe are “pro-tenant” and demanding that judges be more “fair” to landlords.
In 2024, based on the feedback of our tenants who are court-involved, the level of Anti-Black /Latine racism, misogyny and ageism of Brooklyn Housing Court Judges is completely out of control. Tenants are reporting being berated in open court, not being informed of their rights, feeling forced to make decisions that are clearly not in their favor or feeling like the judge is in cahoots with the landlord to evict them. Brooklyn Housing Court is literally destroying lives.
In response, Equality for Flatbush has launched a public Judge Accountability Campaign to pick the “Worst 3 Judges in Brooklyn Housing Court”. The goals of the campaign are to gather data along with audio and video stories at Brooklyn Housing Court , the Brooklyn shelter system and partner with various social service agencies to hold the anti-tenant judges accountable. We also hope that the campaign will reign in the abusive behavior and anti-tenant rulings through the political and media attention that we hope to gain . Currently E4F has online and paper surveys in Kreyol, Spanish and English.
To fill out an online survey about how you been unfairly treated by a Brooklyn Housing Court Judge:
English: https://bit.ly/BKJudgesENG
Spanish: https://bit.ly/BKJudgesSPA
Kreyol: https://bit.ly/BKJudgesKREYOL
To be an organizational community partner for E4Fs judge accountability campaign: https://bit.ly/BKJudgeCommunityPartner