West Village ‘grifter’ Kate Gladstone finally locked out of apartment after eviction
The West Village “grifter” who spent three years living rent-free in one of New York’s toniest neighborhoods got officially locked out on Monday.
A Manhattan housing court judge ruled against Kate Gladstone’s effort to get back into the Barrow Street abode where she had been crashing from June 2019 until her eviction last week.
“I am not going to provide access if your items are no longer there,” Judge Evon Asforis told Gladstone, who appeared at the hearing virtually.
“Ms. Gladstone, you have to go to a shelter if you have nowhere else to go,” Asforis said.
Gladstone, 46, who also goes by the name Katherine Klein, claimed to the judge that, “This all happened so quickly.”
“We have zero access to the apartment,” she said.
But Gladstone’s ouster is the culmination of years of eviction effort on the part of Valentina Bajada and Heidi Russell, who have owned the two-bedroom pad in the waterfront co-op since 2016.
The saga began in June 2019 when Gladstone moved in with her child, paying $2,000 for one of the rooms in the pad on a month-to-month basis, according to court documents.
Soon afterward, Russell asked Gladstone to move out, saying her mother needed to stay with her to recover from an upcoming surgery.
Gladstone refused, the landlords said — and stopped paying rent.
Russell and Bajada took her to court in December 2019, and secured an agreement for the unwanted tenant to leave the following March.
But by the time Gladstone’s supposed departure date rolled around, the COVID-19 eviction moratorium was in place.
In August 2020, a desperate Russell — who said she spent days wandering the streets with her poodle to avoid Gladstone — sued in a bid to get her out, prompting a front page in The Post. Russell said her unwanted roommate sprayed chemicals, recorded her and blasted music.
In July 2021, the court signed off on a warrant to evict Gladstone, pending a status conference.
But Gladstone claimed financial hardship, which paused the case. In March — two years after she’d initially agreed to leave — Gladstone filed a state Emergency Rental Assistance Program application, which again halted the eviction effort.
On Aug. 5, in the absence of a COVID moratorium and with Gladstone’s ERAP bid denied, Asforis ordered the eviction, which took place Thursday.
Gladstone was back in court Monday, claiming she needed to access the apartment to reclaim personal property.
“[Bajada] has a history of locking us out before. She has a history of taking my things,” she argued.
“There is nothing holding them accountable for not following procedure or not following the law —- they’re getting bolder and bolder.”
An attorney for the landlords, Arthur Schwartz, said that Gladstone still had a key to the front gate of the property.
“She spent a lot of the weekend banging on the door [of the apartment] demanding to be let in,” he said.
Asforis denied Gladstone’s multiple requests to be let back in to the apartment.
He noted that her property had been moved from the home and into a storage unit in The Bronx, and ordered her to retrieve it from there.
