SOMEONE I know has an bad 2bdrm roommate lease situation until December. This morning at 6am. The problematic roommate approached Someone I know and for no reason went off on an unprovoked abusive diatribe about why they’re a “pathological liar, you’re worthless, your parents are worthless and you’ll never be a success like me with my IT job at the gap”.
So while this unprovoked abuse was continuing, the non-evil roommate took out an iPhone in a public area and started documented the abuse, this caused the mean guy to retreat to his room while still uttering hatred.
The nice roommate followed them
To finish the conversation and calmly
Asked them why they felt that sort of abuse was acceptable, when the mean one tried to slam his bedroom door, the nice one briefly blocked the door with his foot to finish the convo all while basically standing in public hallway.
Given this is a completely shared apartment (according to lesse no bedrooms are established, did the nice roommate break any laws by stopping the door?
The mean roommate threatened to call the cops for that behavior.
Am I the only one who is really confused? What does it mean to say “no bedrooms are established” if there are walls and doors? And by “lesse”, do you mean lease? Finally, what is a “berm door”?
I think this might mean that the lease does not establish Bedroom A as “belonging” or assigned to Person X and Bedroom B as belonging to Person Y, but merely says the entire apartment is leased to X and Y together.
That makes sense. I can see how the landlord doesn’t care which room either person takes. But still, once they divide the rooms, the individual bedrooms become private spaces (IMHO, if not in the law). So even if my name is on the lease, it’s intruding for me to enter the roommate’s room uninvited.
If by some miracle this went to court, I would guess the court would side with evil roommate. He should have the ability to close his bedroom door. The nice roommate overstepped his bounds by preventing the door from closing. The evil roommate could even say he felt threatened because he was being filmed and nice roommate was continuing to follow him even when he was retreating into his bedroom. There was no need to put a foot in the door. The conversation could have been continued through the door or at a later time.
I don’t suspect that “no established bedroom in the lease” would make a bit of difference in court. There would need to be a history that the bedrooms are clearly shared space and they each freely make use of both of them. I suspect that there is a defacto bedroom for each person, and that would be considered that person’s private space. Likely there was a conversation when they moved in that was something like “Which bedroom do you want? Ok, that one is yours and this one is mine.”
How old are these people? These kinds of roommate disagreements typically just get worse. There’s typically not a solution where evil roommate becomes reasonable roommate. How much longer left on the lease?
I have to question your labels of “problematic” and “nice”. The so-called “problematic” roommate tried to retreat and de-escalate the situation, and the so-called “nice” roommate refused to de-escalate and only continued to provoke the “problematic” roommate. The fact that the “nice” roommate could not back down and give the “problematic” roommate space and time to calm down probably hints at why the “problematic” roommate has a lot of hostility towards the “nice” roommate to start with.
This does not excuse the abusive behavior, but the roommate who refuses to let the matter drop to the point of preventing the other roommate from closing the door is definitely not innocent in this situation. If nothing else, they are refusing to let things drop and cool down and seem to be intentionally provoking the other roommate just because they can’t let things drop.
Both parties seem to be at fault here.
Regardless of whether stopping the door was a legal act or not, it was an extremely bad thing to do under the circumstances. Tell them not to do that again. They should be trying to de-escalate the situation, not escalating the situation by continuing to provoke the other roommate. This is especially true if the other roommate is engaging in verbally abusive behavior.
Seconded. ‚nice’ roomate was physically cornering ‚problematic‘ roommate. When someone does not allow me to retreat to my personal bedroom and close the door behind me I‘d see that as escalating from ‚argument‘ to ‚assault‘ and I‘d begin to examine my self defence options.
Think of it this way: if there are no defined bedrooms, can one roommate install hidden cameras in another roommate’s room? After all, it isn’t “their” room.
That’s threatening behavior, no matter how “calmly” it’s done.
It reads to me like both parties to this situation behaved very badly. And it also reads to me like they should quit sharing living quarters with each other as soon as possible.
While I don’t think it’s illegal, you shouldn’t have followed your roommate into her room and blocked the door with your foot when she didn’t want to talk to you anymore. Sounds like a lesson in learning to grow up for the both of you