Long before the complaints about shrieking parrots, many years before lawyers were hired and stern letters exchanged, and more than a decade before the Department of Justice literally turned the building into a federal case, the Rutherford, a 14-story co-op in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan, was a pretty tranquil place to live.
At least it seemed that way to Charlotte Kullen. In late 1999, she was 26 and had already navigated a couple of difficult landlords as a renter in the city. When she closed on a small studio apartment on the Rutherford’s fifth floor, she felt relief.
“I was like, OK, peace and quiet and no problems,” she said in a recent interview. “It’d be an investment. And then, you know, in five years or whatever, I get married and I go have kids somewhere. In the meantime, I can paint my walls, I can decorate.”
Soon after arriving, she met her next-door neighbor, Meril Lesser, who had also recently moved in and was working on a master’s degree in psychology. The pair had plenty in common. They were both from New Jersey and roughly the same age. Both were deeply attached to their animals. Ms. Kullen owned a cat and eventually two papillon dogs, as well as a horse she kept in a barn in New Jersey. Ms. Lesser lived with two parrots.
The women quickly developed a friendship, one that started warmly enough. Together they went to bars and parties and sought a place in Manhattan’s social whirl, all the while trying to gain traction professionally. Ms. Kullen was laid off from a public relations firm, then cycled through a few different jobs before founding her own P.R. shop and working out of her apartment. Ms. Lesser was briefly a social worker and eventually started making jewelry, which she sold through an Etsy store.
Over the years, the neighbors shared meals, dating advice, pain relievers and the occasional holiday.
“What are your Christmas plans?” Ms. Lesser wrote in a text in late December 2014.
“Ha ha,” replied Ms. Kullen. “Gym. Am sitting around?! Am rather bleh.”
“We can order Chinese food and watch movies?” Ms. Lesser wrote.
“Sounds good to me!” Ms. Kullen texted back.
For a while, the two kept keys to each other’s homes, which made it easy to care for those pets and do the occasional favor. When Ms. Kullen wound up in a New Jersey hospital in 2014 after falling off her horse and breaking a femur, Ms. Lesser drove to the hospital with teddy bears, nail polish and other items Ms. Kullen wanted.
In January 2015, however, the relationship quickly unraveled. That was when Ms. Lesser brought home a third parrot, a Goffin’s cockatoo named Curtis. Ms. Kullen was soon complaining that Curtis emitted an intermittent, nerve-shredding screech, which roused Ginger, a white-fronted Amazon, to start cackling. The noise went straight through the wall, Ms. Kullen said in court papers, and sounded as if one animal were being tortured while another laughed.
After the women failed to find a resolution, Ms. Kullen spent months begging the co-op’s board to intervene. More than a year later, it did. In March 2016, the head of the board demanded that Ms. Lesser quiet her parrots. When the warnings didn’t work, eviction proceedings began.
To Ms. Lesser, the noise crisis was a sinister charade, an attempt by Ms. Kullen, in collusion with others in the building, to get her evicted so Ms. Kullen could buy her home, knock down their shared wall and make one large apartment.
“I was gaslit for a year,” Ms. Lesser said in a deposition, one of many documents in the ensuing legal dispute. “I never had a need to quiet the birds down.”
The melee that followed would wind through two courts, drag on for eight years and cost the building a small fortune in legal fees. It spotlighted one of the perennial quirks of life in New York, a place where millions of unavoidable neighbors dwell in tight, intimate configurations determined largely by chance.
Ultimately, the Justice Department would bring a discrimination suit against the building that would hinge on a brief 2016 letter from a psychiatrist. The letter stated that Ms. Lesser’s parrots were not merely pets but emotional support animals — animals, Ms. Lesser would later explain in a deposition, that helped her manage depression and anxiety. The full implications of this would not be evident for years. An emotional-support parrot sounds like a zany detail in a laugh-tracked sitcom, but this story evolves into something grimmer and more perplexing, and ends with two lives altered forever.
‘Past Birdie Bedtime!’
Ms. Lesser acquired two cockatiels in college, she told Ms. Kullen, and they were with her when she moved into the Rutherford. She added a bare-eyed cockatoo named Layla — cockatoos are slightly larger birds that can live for 60 years — and Ginger, the white-fronted Amazon parrot. For a time, all four lived in the apartment, but the cockatiels had died by the time Ms. Lesser found Curtis during a visit to Project Perry, a bird sanctuary in Virginia.
There are about a dozen such sanctuaries around the country, and some who run them think that keeping parrots in homes is a terrible idea. These are not domesticated animals, they say. Parrots are loud and often aggressive, which is why thousands are passed every year from overwhelmed owner to overwhelmed owner, or end up in sanctuaries.
Ms. Lesser was drawn to Curtis in part because of his tragic back story: He had been returned to Perry after being fostered in a home where another parrot, to which he had bonded, had been killed by the boyfriend of the woman who had been caring for them.
“That bird still had love in his heart for people,” Ms. Lesser said in her deposition. “I felt inspired by Curtis.”
The Rutherford is a pet-friendly building, and no permission was needed to add another bird to the flock. Layla and Ginger had been relatively quiet before. That changed when Curtis arrived. It wasn’t long before Ms. Kullen was texting about the noise.
“Way past Birdie Bedtime!” she wrote at 11:37 p.m. on Feb, 2, 2015.
Nine days later: “Are you home? Curtis is going nuts again.”
“Just checking out at supermarkt & then home,” Ms. Lesser replied.
The women seemed to strain to keep up their friendship, chatting about laundry room mishaps and an employee’s outburst at Trader Joe’s. But then Ms. Kullen’s texts get shorter and more desperate.
“Curtis!!!” Ms. Kullen texted on March 18.
“OMG!!!” she texted the next day.
“Coming home! Sorry!” Ms. Lesser texted back. “Will definitely figure out a sound proofing solution!”
A few days later, Ms. Kullen knocked hard on Ms. Lesser’s door. As Ms. Kullen described it in a deposition, she thought that her neighbor wasn’t home and that the knocking would briefly mute the birds, as it often did. Ms. Lesser opened the door.
Ms. Kullen recalled the exchange: “Charlotte, I know. I can hear everything in your apartment, too.”
In Ms. Kullen’s telling, Ms. Lesser then slammed the door shut; in Ms. Lesser’s telling, she closed the door on her screaming neighbor, who was scaring her. In the years to come, the two would see each other in the hallway, in the elevator and on the street. But they would never speak again.
From then on, Ms. Lesser seemed to lose interest in controlling her birds, according to Ms. Kullen. She spent more time away from her apartment, making jewelry. Left alone, Curtis and Ginger squawked for hours.
Even with white noise and earplugs, the sound was unnerving to Ms. Kullen, who sent beseeching emails to the board and Halstead, the building’s management company. The din often made it hard to hear clients on the phone, or to recruit new business, she wrote. She started losing sleep and grinding her teeth.
That May, Halstead sent a warning letter to Ms. Lesser. But at the time, Ms. Kullen was apparently the only person complaining. In September, Jim Ramadei, the board president, sent her an email, asking if she knew of other tenants who were similarly affected. A legal complaint by one person, he wrote, will look like a “spite suit,” and spite suits never win.
“I have asked and people, while they can hear them,” he said of the birds, “they are not bothered by the sound. I need some help here.”
Desperate for relief, Ms. Kullen started making noise complaints to the city. “They are screaming and squawking throughout the day, night and in the middle of the night,” she wrote in one complaint, submitted through an app. On 15 occasions city noise inspectors visited the premises.
Only one reported so much as a chirp. It was February 2016, and the inspector encountered Ms. Lesser as she was leaving her apartment. The birds squawked, and the inspector conferred with Ms. Lesser. She turned around and shushed the animals.
“Noise of parrots ceased,” the inspector wrote. That report ended with the same three words as all the others:
“No action taken.”
A Dozen Recordings
New Yorkers have been complaining about the city’s aural barrage since well before Edgar Allan Poe denounced its cobblestone streets as the most “ingenious contrivance for driving men mad” that had ever been invented. A procession of mayors have tried and failed to turn down Gotham’s dial. In 1935, for example, Fiorello La Guardia started his “War on Noise,” which lasted until he left office a decade later. As part of the campaign, cabbies pledged to honk less.
Neither La Guardia’s war nor any other municipal effort has worked. Last year alone, the number of noise complaints in the city exceeded 750,000. New York is the country’s most densely populated city, which makes features beloved by urban dwellers, like theater and thousands of restaurants, possible. But stacking people by the millions has an inevitable downside.
That’s especially true in buildings with thin walls, like the Rutherford. A small studio there can cost $500,000 or more, but the place was not designed for luxury. It opened in 1961 as a rental that catered to nurses at a nearby hospital.
Developers in this era used “cheap materials,” said Steve Troy, the Rutherford’s current board president, in a candid appraisal during his deposition in the case brought by the Justice Department. With 175 units in the building, the board regularly hears gripes about dropped shoes, barking dogs and loud TVs.
“If we didn’t correct the noise complaints,” Mr. Troy said, “the whole building would be a cacophony.”
Over time, other residents began complaining about the parrots. Marcia Okon, who lived across the hall from Ms. Lesser, said she had walked out of the elevator one day and heard what she described in a deposition as “an auditory assault.” It was bad enough and frequent enough that she stopped inviting friends over and considered selling her apartment, according to Ms. Okon’s deposition. Sam Keany, who lived directly under Ms. Lesser, started sending emails to a Halstead account executive.
“It is 10 p.m. on Saturday and the birds in 5J are raucous,” he wrote on Feb. 6, 2016, one of a series of emails that are part of the court docket. “Nobody is at home. We are trying to sleep.”
Why these complaints were not made sooner is a mystery — neither resident returned email requests for comment — as is the city inspectors’ failure to hear the noise. Maybe it was down to timing. Or shabby execution. On at least one occasion, inspectors gauged the noise level from the lobby, according to the deposition of Rutherford’s superintendent. The lobby is five flights down and on the opposite side of the building.
Regardless, Ms. Kullen made more than a dozen recordings of the parrots from inside her apartment and attached them to complaints to the board. Each captures a 10-minute snippet of what sounds like a pneumatic drill that fires erratically, accompanied by the cackle of another bird.
Both Ms. Okon and Mr. Keany were members of the board, and their complaints seemed to galvanize Mr. Ramadei, its president. In March 2016 — more than a year after Curtis arrived — he sent Ms. Lesser a formal legal warning that gave her 30 days to address her parrots’ noise or else face eviction.
The next week, the building received a letter from Ms. Lesser’s psychiatrist. “In order to function optimally, Ms. Lesser requires the presence of three emotional support animals,” Dr. Adele Tutter wrote, listing Ginger, Layla and Curtis by name. The birds can’t be separated from one another, the doctor explained, and Ms. Lesser can’t be separated from the birds.
The letter ended with an anodyne sentence that should have been understood as a live grenade: “Thank you for accommodating Ms. Lesser’s disability according to the Americans With Disabilities Act.”
Third Rail of Apartment Living
Federal law about emotional support animals is straightforward: They must be accommodated unless they pose a safety threat — a dog that bites, for instance — or accommodation is prohibitively expensive. Nobody from the Rutherford argued that the parrots were dangerous. And nobody proposed a reasonable accommodation, let alone calculated what it would cost.
“Emotional support animals are the third rail of condo and co-op living,” said Aaron Shmulewitz, a lawyer who represents 250 buildings in New York. “Literally, only bad things can come out of refusing a request for a reasonable accommodation in cases like this.”
As the Rutherford moved against her, Ms. Lesser requested a meeting with the board, which never happened. She learned why from a resident, who sent an email, which is part of the court record, recounting a conversation with Mr. Ramadei.
“He told me that he would not sit down and talk to you, that no one would, that he would not allow you to have any information about who was accusing you and when,” the resident wrote to Ms. Lesser. “I told him that this would escalate into a messy legal situation and that you had the means and the will to confront the board about their unreasonableness, etc., and he said he didn’t care, he was going after you.”
In an email to The New York Times, Mr. Ramadei called this account “complete nonsense,” and said the board had made several peace overtures to Ms. Lesser, all of which she ignored.
In June 2016, the Rutherford sued to evict Ms. Lesser. The next month, she moved out, leaving her apartment unoccupied.
“I had no intention of staying in that disgusting environment with these awful people,” she said in her deposition, “who had nothing better to do than harass a woman with mental illness.”
Ms. Lesser never produced any evidence of a plot by Ms. Kullen to buy her apartment, but she could be forgiven for concluding that Mr. Ramadei and the board were “going after” her. Rather than drop its litigation after she and her birds departed, the building continued to pursue her for the money it spent on lawyers trying to evict her, a sum that stood at $62,000 in July 2018.
Frustrated and angry, Ms. Lesser emailed the Department of Housing and Urban Development in May 2018 and described a failure to accommodate her disability. As the government investigated, Ms. Lesser tried to sell her apartment.
In 2019, a surgeon from Florida made an offer of $467,500, but the Rutherford board rejected that buyer. In his deposition, Mr. Ramadei said the offer was riddled with missing and conflicting financial information. (The Justice Department later described the rejection in a court filing as “retaliatory.”)
The pandemic slowed HUD’s investigation, but in January 2021 the agency issued a “charge of discrimination” against the Rutherford. The building agreed to suspend the eviction case and opted to fight the government’s case in federal court, rather than in HUD’s independent judicial office.
From then on, lawyers from the Justice Department would represent the interests of Ms. Lesser, although their client was technically the United States. Ms. Lesser now had the very deep pockets of the government behind her.
‘A Culture of Litigation’
Mr. Ramadei said in his deposition that he hadn’t initially known what the phrase “reasonable accommodation” meant and hadn’t asked anyone to explain it.
“Because this, to me, is not a problem with reasonable accommodation,” he said under oath. “It’s a noise issue.”
Even if Mr. Ramadei were right, the Rutherford had blundered. It never hired a professional to place a microphone in an adjacent apartment or the hallway to measure the decibel level of the parrots, which is the standard operating procedure.
Instead, the Rutherford leaned heavily on Charlotte Kullen. Her six-hour deposition, taken in September 2022, is difficult to read, in part because it captures her distress and in part because that distress is, legally speaking, beside the point. The judge overseeing the case signaled that she wanted a mediator to help the sides come to a settlement, and on Aug. 16, 2024, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York issued a press release with the result.
The Rutherford would have to pay Ms. Lesser a total of $750,000 — $585,000, for the shares in her apartment plus $165,000 in damages. The release described the settlement as the largest ever obtained “for a person with disabilities whose housing provider denied them their right to have an assistance animal.”
Reporters and TV cameras briefly camped outside the Rutherford. Most residents knew little or nothing about the case, so late in October, the board finally explained all on a Zoom call. Residents took turns asking questions, trying to grasp the scale of the damage. In addition to the settlement, more than $400,000 had been spent on legal fees, half covered by the building, half by the building’s insurer.
“With all due respect,” said one resident, Andrew Garn, “I see a culture of litigation.”
Mr. Troy, the board president, did not return emailed requests for comment.
A Jar of Feathers
The Rutherford is a co-op, which means buyers agree to a lengthy set of bylaws intended to elevate the quality of life. This confers on co-op boards outsize power, and in many cases the president has outsize power over the board. Mr. Shmulewitz, the real estate lawyer, said he had encountered plenty of co-op leaders who were as imperious as any medieval monarch.
“Some board presidents,” he said, “let emotion get the better of them.”
Mr. Ramadei said the only emotion that had motivated him was empathy for anyone within earshot of those parrots. Now 73 years old, he has gray hair, a neatly trimmed beard and a glint in his eye whenever he says something acerbic, which is often.
We met at a coffee shop near the Rutherford, where Mr. Ramadei relived the litigation with a combination of weariness, relief and a streak of insouciance. He has spent much of his career, he said, as an accountant at medical offices, and he knows how easy it is to get an “emotional support” designation for an animal.
“All you have to do is go online and get a little coat that says ‘service animal’ and you’re done,” he said with a laugh.
Ms. Lesser’s parrots were simply loud pets, he continued, and she was a savvy performer. She turned up at her deposition with a jar of parrot feathers, he noted, explaining that their presence soothed her. Mr. Ramadei still doesn’t buy it.
“I see a really good actress with a prop,” he said.
He no longer serves on the board and acknowledged that after the settlement was announced some residents were angry enough to give him the silent treatment. But his goal wasn’t to make friends, as he put it, and his legacy, he said, will be not the parrots but the improvements he made to the building, including a $1 million renovation of the lobby. Plus he oversaw a bylaw change that bars parrots and every bird on the planet. Today, the only pets allowed in the Rutherford are dogs, cats and fish.
“And they’ve got to be little fish,” Mr. Ramadei quipped. “With their mouths sewn shut.”
‘They Kept Me Alive’
The ostensible winner in this case, Meril Lesser, is not gloating. Not long ago, I sent her an email, asking if she would chat about the case, or just answer a question over email. She called the next day.
“I had my life destroyed for 10 years,” she said, sounding livid. “You cannot fathom what these people did to me.”
Ms. Lesser, 48, comes across on the phone as both fragile and formidable. When she discussed her parrots she conveyed tenderness and deep, deferential gratitude.
“I do have mental illness, and you know what? It’s a disease, and I didn’t choose to have it. But those birds have kept me alive,” she said. “Literally, they kept me alive.”
When the topic turned to the Rutherford, she was unsparing. The place was as cliquey as a high school and run by an ego-tripping, vindictive man she never met, she said. The building’s leaders behaved as if they were above the law.
Dealing with the Justice Department was another ordeal. (“If it had a Yelp page, I’d leave a negative review,” she said.) The department’s lawyer kept reminding her that he’d do what was best for the United States, not her. She had no control over what happened.
A spokesman for the Southern District declined to comment.
Ms. Lesser’s post-Rutherford life has been bumpy, at best. After moving out in 2016, she bought a house in upstate New York and lived there with her parrots. Homeownership offered solitude but not calm. Her basement flooded twice, and when her air-conditioning system broke last summer, she called her father and asked him to pick her up. She and her parrots have lived with him in New Jersey for months.
As for Charlotte Kullen, Ms. Lesser called her “the most angry, the most bitter person I’ve ever met.”
In Ms. Lesser’s telling, they had a friendship of convenience for a while. She said she felt sorry for her former next-door neighbor, who she said didn’t seem to have many friends. The war against Curtis changed everything. She still thinks the complaints were malign fabrications, that her parrots would “vocalize” now and then, as she put it in her deposition, but were never a nuisance.
As she told me, “She’d be like: ‘Where are you? Your birds are going crazy.’ I’m like: ‘Charlotte. I work from home, remember? Nothing’s happening here.’”
Ms. Lesser seems to have forgotten texts, now part of the court record, she sent from the supermarket, or on her way home, promising to hush the birds.
‘My Life Became Smaller and Smaller’
In mid-January, I visited Ms. Kullen in her Rutherford apartment. It’s a small and cozy single room, filled with thriller and mystery paperbacks and paintings she bought in Spain and Ecuador. There are 11 pillows on her bed and pictures of her dogs, cats and horse, a Dutch Warmblood named Asantro, hang on nearly every wall. Behind a plush sofa there’s a framed photograph of water.
“Calming,” she said.
She sat with Sophia, her papillon, on her lap, looking fatigued and pale. She seemed like a sunny person who had been managing a lot of darkness.
“This changed my whole personality,” Ms. Kullen, 51, said. “It definitely doesn’t even make sense to me.”
While the parrots were still at the Rutherford, she couldn’t talk to clients over the din and had difficulty ginning up new business. Her income plummeted, which added to her stress. One day in 2018, she got dizzy and felt short of breath. A few weeks later, she felt she was having a heart attack. Her hair started falling out, and her weight plummeted.
It took a year and a series of physicians, she said, to figure out that she had Graves’s disease, an autoimmune disorder. There were other misfortunes: She got breast cancer, which is now in remission, and her older dog died. She has also coped with migraines, chronic pain and high blood pressure, all of which she attributes to the stress that began with the birds.
Determining the cause of Ms. Kullen’s health woes is impossible, several doctors said. Everyone has a genetic predisposition to develop certain diseases, and a variety of external agents, including stress, can cause maladies to appear that otherwise would not. Whatever the root, she now startles easily and battles insomnia. A psychologist has diagnosed her with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
She has plundered her retirement fund and is now in debt. She is a more or less full-time medical patient, enrolled in Medicaid and living off a loan, the source of which she would not discuss. She subsists on yogurt and frozen pizza.
She has one extravagance: She still owns her horse. Selling him is unthinkable, she said, because he’s family and you can’t sell your family. He’s also one of the very few sources of joy in her life. She no longer travels or socializes, other than visiting her sister in New Jersey.
“I used to have, like, dignity,” she said, tearing up. “I do brand management P.R., and for that you have to have a certain image. So I am not telling people, like, my life is screwed. I can’t tell people that I’m poor and broken. Who’s going to hire you? And I stopped having friends because to have friends in New York, you need money to go out. So my life became smaller and smaller.”
A week before we met, Ms. Kullen came home to find a legal notice taped to her door: The Rutherford was suing her for $22,919 of overdue fees.
“Your landlord has started an eviction nonpayment case against you,” the notice read.
It was a mistake. A lawyer for the building told me that the notice was the result of a miscommunication, but Ms. Kullen sees nothing innocent in the error. She suspects that the building is harassing her, both to collect more recent fees that are in arrears and in the hopes that she will leave.
She thinks the debt runs in the other direction.
“I could have sued,” she said. “For my apartment not being habitable, for not upholding the noise rules. They did nothing.”
To her, the noise was something akin to a car crash, with all of its implications for suffering and liability. Unlike most survivors, though, she lives at the scene of the accident. In fact, she never seriously considered moving. This apartment is both a refuge and the site of her undoing.
Still, as she looks back on her years at the Rutherford, she can think of nothing she would have done differently. She’s even nostalgic for her pre-Curtis friendship with Ms. Lesser. It pains her to think that Ms. Lesser might read this article and delight in the shambles her life has become.
On second thought, maybe she has one regret.
“When I moved in, there was an apartment on the 10th floor for sale,” she said, with a pained smile. “I could have had that one.”
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