A tenant who wins an eviction case often wins something that feels incomplete. The landlord's case is dismissed, the tenant keeps the apartment, and that is a real victory—but the tenant has spent months and, frequently, thousands of dollars in legal fees defending against a case that should never have been brought. Winning the right to stay is not the same as being made whole. And when the eviction was itself retaliation for the tenant having asserted their rights, the sense of injustice sharpens: the tenant did everything right, the landlord struck back, the tenant won, and the tenant is still out the cost of the fight.
A New York appellate decision addresses exactly this gap, and it does so through a provision many tenants have never heard of. In Graham Court Owner's Corp. v. Taylor, a tenant named Kyle Taylor had successfully challenged his apartment's deregulation and won a rent-overcharge complaint. The landlord then tried to evict him, claiming he had made unauthorized electrical alterations. The trial court found that the landlord's own agents had authorized the work, dismissed the eviction, and concluded it had been brought in retaliation for the overcharge win. Taylor had beaten the eviction. But the question that reached the Appellate Division was whether he could also recover his attorneys' fees—and the court held that he could, on the strength of the landlord's own lease.
The decision, Graham Court Owner's Corp. v. Taylor, 2014 NY Slip Op 00311, 115 A.D.3d 50, was issued on January 21, 2014, by the Appellate Division, First Department. Its central lesson is one that can change the calculus for any tenant facing a weak or retaliatory eviction: because the lease gave the landlord the right to recover legal fees from the tenant, New York law implied a reciprocal right running the other way, letting the tenant recover fees from the landlord. The clause the landlord inserted to protect itself became the basis for the tenant's recovery.
This guide explains what happened, how a tenant can challenge an alleged lease violation with evidence that the work was authorized, how a successful rent complaint and a later eviction attempt can be connected as retaliation, how reciprocal legal-fee provisions work in the tenant's favor, and why winning an eviction defense and recovering legal fees are two separate questions with two separate answers.
The sequence of events matters, because the timing is part of the story. The tenant leased a Manhattan apartment that the landlord treated as unregulated. The tenant challenged that treatment, filing a rent-overcharge complaint with the state housing agency. The agency found that the tenant had in fact been overcharged and that the apartment remained rent-regulated—a significant win for the tenant. The landlord fought that determination in court and lost; the overcharge finding stood.
Having lost the overcharge fight, the landlord turned to a different theory. It claimed the tenant had made unauthorized electrical alterations in the apartment's kitchen. It served the tenant with a notice to cure, then terminated the lease, and then brought a summary holdover proceeding—an eviction case—seeking to remove the tenant on the ground that the unauthorized alterations breached the lease.
The eviction case went to trial, and the tenant's defense was factual: the work had been authorized. The tenant put on evidence that the landlord's own agents had approved the electrical work. The trial court credited that evidence. It found that because the landlord's agents had authorized the work, there was no lease breach at all—the entire premise of the eviction was false. The court also found the landlord's principal not credible. It dismissed the eviction proceeding. And it went further: it found that the proceeding had been brought in retaliation for the tenant's successful overcharge complaint. The eviction was not a good-faith enforcement of the lease; it was payback.
That left the question of attorneys' fees. The tenant had spent money defending the eviction and wanted to recover it. The case worked its way up to the Appellate Division, First Department, on that issue. And the First Department held that the tenant could recover his reasonable attorneys' fees under Real Property Law § 234, because the lease contained a provision allowing the landlord to recover its legal fees—which, under the statute, triggered a reciprocal right for the tenant to recover his. The court sent the case back to the trial court for a hearing to determine the amount of the fees. Notably, it did not decide the tenant's alternative argument that he could recover fees under the retaliation statute; the § 234 ground was enough to give him the recovery.
The decision was not unanimous—it drew a dissent—which is a reminder that the reach of the fee statute was genuinely contested. But the majority's holding is the law of the case and a clear statement of how the reciprocal-fee principle works.
Before the fee question, there was the eviction itself, and how the tenant beat it is worth understanding, because it illustrates a defense available to many tenants accused of violating a lease. The landlord's claim was that the tenant had made unauthorized alterations—electrical work in the kitchen. On its face, that is a plausible lease-violation theory: leases commonly prohibit tenants from making alterations without the landlord's consent, and a tenant who rewires a kitchen without permission could indeed be in breach.
But the premise can be wrong, and here it was. The tenant's defense was not that the alterations did not happen, or that the lease did not restrict alterations, but that the work had been authorized—that the landlord's own agents had approved it. If the work was authorized, there was no violation, because the lease prohibits only unauthorized alterations. Authorization is a complete answer to the charge. The trial court credited the tenant's evidence on this point and found there was no breach.
This is a crucial and underappreciated line of defense. When a landlord accuses a tenant of violating the lease by doing something—making an alteration, keeping a pet, taking in an occupant, whatever it may be—the tenant's first question should be whether the thing was actually prohibited or whether it was permitted, consented to, or authorized. Landlords and their agents give permission in many ways: explicitly, in writing, verbally, through a managing agent or superintendent, or by acquiescing in conduct they knew about and did not object to. A tenant who can show that the landlord or its agents authorized the very conduct now being called a violation has a defense that goes to the heart of the eviction, because it negates the breach entirely.
The evidentiary lesson is to preserve proof of authorization whenever you do something that touches on the lease. If a superintendent or managing agent approves work, get it in writing if you can, or at least note who approved it, when, and how. Keep emails, texts, and letters. Note conversations. If a landlord's agent is on site while work is done and raises no objection, that too can be evidence of authorization or acquiescence. In Graham Court, the tenant had enough evidence of authorization that the trial court believed him over the landlord's principal, whom it found not credible. The authorization defense succeeds or fails on evidence, and the tenant who documents permission is the tenant who can prove it later.
A further point worth drawing out is the credibility finding. The trial court found the landlord's principal not credible. In a case that comes down to competing accounts—the landlord says the work was unauthorized, the tenant says it was approved—credibility is often decisive, and the tenant's documentation and consistent account can tip it. The tenant who can corroborate their version with records is far more likely to be believed than one relying on memory alone.
The Graham Court eviction did not arise in a vacuum. It came after the tenant had successfully challenged the landlord on rent—winning an overcharge finding and a determination that the apartment remained regulated. The trial court connected those dots and found the eviction retaliatory. Understanding how that connection is drawn is valuable for any tenant who finds themselves facing an eviction after they have asserted a right.
New York law protects tenants against retaliatory eviction. The core idea is that a landlord may not evict, or refuse to renew, or otherwise retaliate against a tenant because the tenant exercised a legal right—such as complaining about conditions, reporting violations, or, as here, challenging an illegal rent. Retaliation is prohibited because the right to complain is hollow if asserting it invites removal. A tenant who could be evicted for filing an overcharge complaint would, in practice, be unable to file one.
The difficulty with retaliation is that landlords rarely announce it. A landlord bent on retaliating does not say "I am evicting you because you complained." Instead, the landlord finds another reason—an alleged lease violation, a claimed need to use the apartment, a technical default—and brings the eviction on that ground. So retaliation usually has to be inferred from the circumstances, and the most powerful circumstance is timing and sequence. When a tenant asserts a right and the landlord responds with an eviction shortly afterward, especially an eviction on a pretextual or weak ground, the sequence itself suggests a retaliatory motive.
That is the pattern in Graham Court. The tenant won the overcharge fight. The landlord, having lost, came back with an eviction premised on supposedly unauthorized electrical work—work that turned out to have been authorized all along. The eviction's premise was false, and it followed the tenant's successful complaint. The trial court saw the shape of retaliation in that sequence: a landlord who had been beaten on rent manufacturing a lease-violation theory to remove the tenant who beat it. The falsity of the stated ground reinforced the inference; an eviction built on a nonexistent breach looks less like genuine lease enforcement and more like a search for a reason to retaliate.
For a tenant, the lesson is to recognize the pattern and to understand that the law sees it too. If you have asserted a right—complained about conditions, reported a violation, challenged your rent—and the landlord responds with an eviction, particularly one on a shaky or pretextual ground, the timing is not just suspicious to you; it is legally significant. Retaliation can be inferred from the sequence of a protected act followed by an adverse response. Documenting that sequence—when you asserted the right, when the landlord moved to evict, and how weak the stated ground is—builds the retaliation case. The tenant should preserve the record of their protected activity and its timing, because that record is what allows a court to see the retaliatory shape of what followed.
The most distinctive and practically valuable part of Graham Court is the attorneys'-fee holding, and it turns on a feature of New York law that tenants should know about: Real Property Law § 234. This statute is the mechanism that let the tenant recover his fees, and it works in a way that can feel almost poetic—it turns the landlord's own one-sided lease language against the landlord.
Leases are usually drafted by landlords, and they are usually drafted to favor landlords. One common feature is a clause allowing the landlord to recover its attorneys' fees and legal expenses from the tenant when the tenant breaches the lease or the landlord has to enforce it. In the Graham Court lease, paragraph 15 allowed the landlord, upon canceling the lease and retaking the apartment, to re-rent it and apply the rent collected first to the landlord's expenses—which included legal fees. In other words, the lease let the landlord recoup its legal costs out of the tenant's situation. That is a landlord-favoring fee provision, and such provisions are standard.
Real Property Law § 234 responds to the one-sidedness of these clauses. The statute provides that when a residential lease gives the landlord the right to recover attorneys' fees arising out of the tenant's breach, the law implies a reciprocal covenant—a matching promise, read into the lease by operation of law—that the landlord will pay the tenant's reasonable attorneys' fees when the tenant successfully defends a proceeding the landlord brought arising out of the lease, or when the landlord breaches. The statute's purpose, as the court described it, is to level the playing field between landlords and tenants. A landlord who writes itself a right to fees cannot keep that right one-directional; the statute makes it run both ways.
The effect is striking. A tenant does not need a lease that expressly promises the tenant attorneys' fees. The tenant needs only a lease that gives the landlord a right to fees—which most landlord-drafted leases do. Section 234 then supplies the tenant's side of the bargain automatically. The clause the landlord put in to protect itself becomes the legal basis for the tenant to recover when the tenant wins. In Graham Court, the court held that paragraph 15's provision—letting the landlord apply re-letting income to its legal fees—was the kind of clause that triggers § 234, and so the reciprocal covenant applied. Having defeated the eviction, the tenant was entitled to recover his reasonable attorneys' fees from the landlord.
For a tenant, this is enormously consequential, and it is worth checking your own lease with it in mind. If your lease contains any provision allowing the landlord to recover attorneys' fees or legal expenses—and many do, often buried in a clause about the landlord's remedies on default—then § 234 may give you a reciprocal right to recover your fees if you successfully defend an eviction or other proceeding the landlord brings under the lease. You do not need the lease to mention your fees at all. The landlord's fee clause is the trigger. This transforms the economics of defending a weak or retaliatory eviction: a tenant who might have hesitated to fight because of the legal cost may, if they win, be able to shift that cost back to the landlord.
It is worth being honest that the reach of § 234 was contested in this very case. The decision drew a dissent, which would have read the lease's clause as insufficient to trigger the statute, on the view that the clause merely let the landlord offset re-letting income and did not truly award it fees in a way that implied a reciprocal right. The majority disagreed and held the clause sufficient. The disagreement is a reminder that whether a particular lease clause triggers § 234 can depend on the clause's specific language and how a court reads it—which is a reason for a tenant to get knowledgeable advice about their own lease rather than assuming the outcome. But the majority's holding stands as a clear statement that a landlord-favoring fee clause of this type triggers the tenant's reciprocal right.
One of the clearest structural lessons of Graham Court is that defeating an eviction and recovering attorneys' fees are two distinct questions, resolved by different rules, and that winning the first does not automatically deliver the second.
The tenant won the eviction at trial. The proceeding was dismissed because the alterations had been authorized and there was no breach, and the court found the eviction retaliatory. That was a complete victory on the eviction itself—the tenant kept the apartment. But that victory did not, by itself, answer whether the tenant could recover the money he had spent defending the case. The fee question was separate, and it had its own legal basis to be established. It took an appeal to the First Department to resolve it in the tenant's favor, and the resolution rested not on the fact that the tenant won the eviction but on the specific operation of § 234 and the lease's fee clause.
The separateness is visible in the procedural history. At one stage, the Appellate Term had affirmed the dismissal of the eviction but rejected the tenant's claim for fees under § 234—showing that a court could agree the tenant won the eviction while disagreeing that he was entitled to fees. The two questions came apart. It was only the First Department that connected the tenant's victory to a fee recovery, and it did so through § 234's reciprocal covenant, not as an automatic consequence of winning.
The separateness also appears in what the court chose not to decide. The tenant had argued, in the alternative, that he could recover fees under the retaliation statute itself—that because the eviction was retaliatory, the retaliation statute entitled him to fees. The First Department did not reach that argument. Having found that § 234 gave the tenant his fees, the court did not need to decide whether the retaliation statute offered an independent route. This matters because it means the case establishes the § 234 path clearly but leaves the retaliation-statute fee question unresolved in this decision. A tenant should not assume that winning on retaliation automatically carries a fee award; here, the fee recovery came from the lease-based reciprocal covenant, and the alternative retaliation-based theory was left undecided.
For a tenant, the practical takeaway is to treat the fee recovery as its own project, not a byproduct of winning. If you successfully defend an eviction, recovering your fees requires identifying a legal basis for the recovery—most powerfully, a landlord-favoring fee clause in your lease that triggers § 234's reciprocal covenant—and then proving the amount of your reasonable fees, typically at a separate hearing like the one the court ordered in Graham Court. Winning the eviction gets you the predicate (a successful defense); the fee statute and your lease get you the recovery. Keeping the two questions distinct in your mind helps you pursue the fees deliberately rather than assuming they will follow automatically.
It helps to translate the case into the situation of an ordinary tenant, because the pattern in Graham Court is one many renters could find themselves in.
Imagine you challenged your landlord over something you had a right to challenge—you complained to the city about conditions, or you contested your rent as an illegal overcharge, and you won, or at least made real trouble for the landlord. Not long after, the landlord serves you with a notice claiming you violated your lease—say, by making an alteration to the apartment—and then brings an eviction case on that ground. You are alarmed. You did make the change, but you had permission; the superintendent approved it. Now you are facing eviction and the prospect of paying a lawyer to defend yourself over something you were allowed to do.
Graham Court maps onto this closely. Your first line of defense is the authorization: if the landlord's agent approved the alteration, there was no violation, and the eviction's premise collapses. Your evidence of that permission—an email from the super, a text, a witness, a consistent account—is what wins that fight, especially if it makes your version more credible than the landlord's. Second, the timing matters: an eviction that follows your successful complaint, on a ground that turns out to be false, has the shape of retaliation, and the law recognizes that shape. Third—and this is the part tenants miss—look at your lease. If it contains a clause letting the landlord recover legal fees, § 234 may give you a reciprocal right to recover your fees when you win. The cost of defending may be shiftable back to the landlord.
What you would do with all of this is, first, defend the eviction on the merits, marshaling your evidence that the conduct was authorized and, where applicable, raising retaliation. Second, preserve the record of your protected activity and its timing, because that is what supports the retaliation inference. Third, examine your lease for a landlord fee clause and, if you find one, plan to seek your attorneys' fees under § 234 if you prevail—understanding that this is a separate request, likely resolved at its own hearing on the amount. And throughout, document everything: the authorization, the sequence of events, the fees you incur.
The reason the hypothetical tracks the case is that the case is the hypothetical, lived out. A tenant who had won on rent, who was hit with a false lease-violation eviction, who proved the work was authorized, who was found to have been retaliated against, and who then recovered his legal fees because of the landlord's own lease clause. The facts are specific, but the pattern—assert a right, face retaliation, win on authorization, recover fees through reciprocity—is a template many tenants can use.
Knowing the case is one thing; using it is another. Here is how a tenant can apply the lessons of Graham Court.
Examine your lease for a legal-fee clause now, before any dispute. Look for any provision—often in the section on the landlord's remedies, default, or re-letting—that lets the landlord recover attorneys' fees, legal costs, or "expenses" that include legal fees. If it is there, you may have a reciprocal right under § 234 to recover your own fees if you successfully defend a proceeding the landlord brings under the lease. Knowing this in advance changes how you think about the cost of fighting.
If accused of a lease violation, ask first whether the conduct was authorized or permitted. Many eviction cases premised on a lease violation can be defeated by showing the landlord or its agents consented to the very conduct at issue. Gather your proof of authorization—written approvals, emails, texts, the identity of who approved and when, witnesses, evidence that the landlord knew and did not object. Authorization negates the breach and can end the case.
Preserve the record of any right you have asserted and its timing. If you complained about conditions, reported violations, or challenged your rent, keep the dates and documentation. If an eviction follows, the sequence—protected activity, then an adverse response on a weak ground—is what supports a retaliation finding. The clearer and better-documented the sequence, the stronger the inference.
Treat the fee recovery as a separate step. Winning the eviction establishes that you successfully defended; it does not automatically award you fees. Identify your legal basis for fees—most powerfully a § 234 reciprocal right triggered by the landlord's fee clause—and be prepared to prove the amount of your reasonable fees at a hearing. Keep careful records of your legal costs so you can document them.
Get knowledgeable advice, especially on the lease and the fee question. Whether a particular lease clause triggers § 234 can turn on the clause's exact language, as the split decision in Graham Court shows. An eviction defense, a retaliation claim, and a fee application are legally involved, and a tenant attorney or a local tenant-rights organization can assess your lease, your defense, and your fee entitlement. Many legal aid organizations across New York assist tenants with eviction defense and related claims, and the possibility of recovering your fees under § 234 can make representation more feasible than it might first appear.
Several intuitive but mistaken beliefs leave tenants unaware of the tools Graham Court illustrates, and the case speaks to each.
The first misconception is that if you did the thing the landlord complains of, you have violated the lease. Not necessarily. If the landlord or its agents authorized the conduct, there is no violation, because the lease prohibits only unauthorized acts. A tenant who made the alteration, kept the pet, or took in the occupant with permission has a complete defense, provided they can prove the permission.
The second misconception is that retaliation has to be proven with a confession. It does not. Landlords almost never state a retaliatory motive; retaliation is inferred from the sequence—a tenant asserts a right, and the landlord responds with an adverse action on a weak or false ground. The timing and the pretextual nature of the stated reason are what reveal the motive.
The third misconception is that winning the eviction automatically gets you your legal fees back. It does not. Defeating the eviction and recovering fees are separate questions. In Graham Court, the tenant won the eviction at trial but had to litigate the fee question up to the Appellate Division, where it was resolved on the specific operation of a fee statute, not as an automatic consequence of the win.
The fourth misconception is that you can recover fees only if your lease promises you fees. The opposite is the useful truth: under Real Property Law § 234, a lease that gives the landlord a right to fees implies a reciprocal right for the tenant. You do not need the lease to mention your fees at all. The landlord's own fee clause is the trigger.
The fifth misconception is that a landlord-drafted lease only ever helps the landlord. The reciprocal-fee rule turns that assumption around. The clause the landlord inserted to shift legal costs onto the tenant can become the basis for the landlord to pay the tenant's costs when the tenant wins. The one-sided clause is made two-sided by law.
The sixth misconception is that whether a fee clause triggers § 234 is always obvious. It is not. The clause's specific language matters, and reasonable judges can disagree—as the 3–2 split in Graham Court shows, where the dissent read the same clause as insufficient. This is a reason to get advice on your particular lease rather than assuming the result either way.
The fee holding in Graham Court is worth situating in the larger reality of how eviction disputes actually play out, because the reciprocal-fee rule addresses a structural imbalance that shapes nearly every landlord-tenant fight.
The imbalance is economic. Landlords, especially larger ones, are often repeat players with lawyers on retainer and the resources to litigate. Tenants are usually one-time participants for whom the cost of a lawyer can rival or exceed the value of what is in dispute. That asymmetry has a chilling effect: a tenant with a valid defense may give up rather than fight, not because the defense is weak but because winning would cost more than losing. A landlord who understands this can use the threat of litigation cost as leverage, bringing or threatening eviction knowing the tenant may fold to avoid legal bills. The one-sided fee clause in a landlord's lease sharpens that leverage further, because it tells the tenant that losing means paying the landlord's lawyers on top of everything else.
Real Property Law § 234 is the legislature's answer to that imbalance, and the reason the court described its purpose as leveling the playing field. By making the landlord's fee clause reciprocal, the statute removes the one-directional threat and replaces it with symmetry: if the tenant loses, the tenant may owe the landlord's fees, but if the tenant wins, the landlord owes the tenant's. That symmetry changes the incentives on both sides. For the tenant, it makes a valid defense worth mounting, because victory can bring the cost back. For the landlord, it raises the stakes of bringing a weak case, because losing now means paying not just its own lawyers but the tenant's too. A landlord contemplating a pretextual or retaliatory eviction has to reckon with the possibility of footing the tenant's legal bill.
This is why the reciprocal-fee rule matters beyond the particular facts of Graham Court. It is not merely a way for one tenant to recoup costs; it is a structural counterweight that makes tenant rights enforceable in practice. Rights that cannot be affordably defended are rights in name only. A tenant who cannot afford a lawyer cannot assert the authorization defense, cannot raise retaliation, cannot hold the landlord to the lease—unless there is a realistic prospect of recovering the cost of doing so. Section 234 supplies that prospect wherever the lease contains a landlord fee clause, which is to say in a great many residential leases.
The practical upshot for tenants is to see the fee clause not as fine print that only threatens them but as a potential asset. When you read your lease and find the provision letting the landlord recover legal fees, recognize that, under § 234, it may cut both ways. It is the clause that can make fighting a weak eviction economically rational rather than ruinous. And because the statute exists precisely to level the field, a tenant who prevails in defending a lease-based proceeding should affirmatively pursue the fee recovery it makes available, rather than treating the legal cost of winning as simply the price of keeping their home. The law does not intend that price to fall on the tenant who was in the right.
There is a note of realism to add. The reciprocal right depends on the lease having the triggering clause, on the tenant prevailing, and on the clause being construed to fall within § 234—which, as the divided decision reminds us, is not always certain. The rule is powerful but not automatic, and its application to a specific lease is a question worth professional assessment. But the principle is settled and significant: a landlord's fee clause can arm the tenant, and the statute that makes it so exists to ensure that the cost of vindicating a right does not swallow the right itself.
It is worth being candid about the scope of Graham Court Owner's Corp. v. Taylor. It is an Appellate Division decision, which carries real precedential weight within its department, but it resolved a contested question by a divided court—three judges in the majority, two in dissent. The disagreement was about whether the particular lease clause was enough to trigger § 234's reciprocal fee covenant. The majority held it was; the dissent would have held it was not, reading the clause as a mere offset of re-letting income rather than a true fee-recovery right. That division is a signal that the application of § 234 to a given lease depends on the clause's specific language and how a court construes it. A different clause, or a different court, could analyze it differently.
What the case does not do is guarantee a fee recovery for every tenant who wins an eviction. The recovery depends on having a lease clause that triggers § 234, on successfully defending a proceeding arising out of the lease, and on proving reasonable fees. A tenant whose lease contains no landlord-favoring fee provision may have no § 234 right at all, and would have to look to another basis for fees, if one exists. And the decision expressly left undecided the alternative question of whether fees are recoverable under the retaliation statute, so it is not authority that winning on retaliation yields fees. The point of understanding the case is to understand the reciprocal-fee mechanism and the defenses that preceded it, not to assume a particular outcome in a different situation.
What is reliable, because it reflects the statute and the decision's holding, is the framework. A tenant accused of a lease violation can defeat the charge with evidence that the conduct was authorized by the landlord or its agents. An eviction that follows a tenant's successful assertion of a right, on a weak or false ground, can be found retaliatory based on the sequence. Real Property Law § 234 implies a reciprocal fee covenant in a residential lease that gives the landlord a right to attorneys' fees, allowing the tenant to recover reasonable fees upon successfully defending a landlord's lease-based proceeding. And recovering fees is a separate question from winning the eviction, resolved by the fee statute and the lease rather than following automatically from the defense. Those are the tools the case puts on display.
The most satisfying lesson of Graham Court Owner's Corp. v. Taylor is the reversal at its center. Landlords write leases to protect themselves, and a clause letting the landlord recover its legal fees from the tenant is a standard piece of that self-protection. It is there to make the tenant bear the cost of disputes. But New York law does not let that clause run only one way. Through Real Property Law § 234, the landlord's own fee provision implies a matching right for the tenant—so that when the tenant wins, the clause the landlord wrote becomes the basis for the landlord to pay the tenant's fees. The weapon pointed at the tenant turns around.
For you as a tenant, that means a weak or retaliatory eviction need not leave you victorious but out of pocket. If you can show the conduct the landlord calls a violation was actually authorized, you can defeat the eviction on its merits. If the eviction followed your assertion of a right, on a shaky ground, the law may see it as retaliation. And if your lease gives the landlord a right to legal fees—as most landlord-drafted leases do—§ 234 may give you the reciprocal right to recover yours when you prevail. Check your lease for that clause; it may be the most valuable sentence in the document, precisely because the landlord wrote it against you.
Winning the right to stay in your home is the first victory. Winning back the cost of the fight is the second, and it does not come automatically—but New York law provides a path to it that runs straight through the landlord's own lease. The tenant in Graham Court walked that path from a successful rent complaint, through a retaliatory eviction he defeated, to the recovery of his legal fees. The first step for any tenant is knowing the path is there.
