An alleged serial squatter has become a nightmare for an Upper West Side couple: She refused to leave their apartment after they gave her shelter for a supposedly short stay, a new lawsuit says.
A friend of Celeste Champoux – a film producer who worked on the 1988 B-movie “Senior Week” – told Nancy Hament and her husband Richard Scarola that his pal needed a place to stay before their upcoming move to Hawaii, according to the Manhattan Supreme Court filing.
But more than a year later, Champoux is still living in the family’s bare one-room apartment, just steps from the Natural History Museum – while making threats and trespassing on their property in the hallway of the posh seven-story prewar building, the lawsuit says.
Now Champoux – who has been sued in eviction proceedings at least two other times since 2014 – is demanding $25,000 from the couple if she moves out, according to the lawsuit filed by Scarola, an attorney representing his wife in the matter.
However, Champoux’s lawyer said on Tuesday that the lawsuit was baseless – and accused the “evil” couple of “mistreating elderly people” and of cutting off electricity and water to their client’s apartment.
“You can’t just cut off her basic services to force her to move,” her lawyer, Stephen C. Dachtera, told the Washington Post.
The couple is suing not only Champoux, but also the friend who introduced them to the woman. They accuse him of fraud. He knowingly deceived them and allegedly told them that she just needed a place to stay before moving to Hawaii.
Cameraman John Corso, who also worked on “Senior Week,” “falsely stated that Champoux was planning to move to Hawaii and that her stay there would be very short,” according to the lawsuit filed Monday.
The couple “agreed that she could stay on the premises for a short period of time for a nominal fee,” the lawsuit says. The price did not even cover the upkeep of the studio apartment, which is adjacent to their primary residence on a prime corner of West 81st Street and Columbus Avenue.
“Champoux obtained her right to use the premises through fraud by Corso, to the great and continuing detriment of plaintiff,” the complaint states.
Corso was also involved in Champoux’s two previous eviction lawsuits. Neither of them responded to requests for comment on Tuesday.
In 2014, Champoux’s Upper East Side landlord began eviction proceedings against her for failing to pay rent, but she says she intentionally withheld payments because repairs to her rent-controlled apartment on East 87th Street were not completed.
According to court documents, Corso attempted to vouch for Champoux, claiming he could cover her rent once “project financing” was secured for an unspecified IMAX film.
In total, Champoux paid less than $3,000 of the nearly $60,000 she owed. After living there for 46 years, she was finally evicted from her apartment in 2018.
Months later, she moved to the Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen’s Club in Midtown, where she said she had made an agreement to provide marketing services to the discount hotel for military personnel in exchange for a free room.
The club’s attorney claimed during a pretrial hearing in February 2020 that Corso and Champoux “committed a fraud” to get her a room by claiming the senior citizen, who said her only income was a $125 monthly pension, was a marketing genius.
“Our director fell for her story,” said Margaret Ann Harley, the club’s board secretary, “that according to her friend and this other gentleman, she was a marketing expert,” a reference to Corso.
“And she was not a marketing expert at all. She … did not perform any of her duties, and then we asked her to leave, but she did not want to leave,” Harley told the court.
Champoux, who claimed to be a former diplomat in this 2020 transcript, added: “It’s not like I just fell out of a coconut tree.”
She managed to find a lawyer using a COVID hardship declaration and did not leave the country until April 2023 after a $25,000 payout.
According to the couple’s lawsuit, Champoux moved into the Upper West Side apartment that same summer.
Champoux lawyer Dachtera told the Post that his client is frail and barely able to hear and that Corso is a dear friend who is helping her through her difficulties.
According to a 2012 article on the now-defunct local news site DNAinfo, Champoux would be nearly 80 years old today.
Dachtera said he had never heard of Hawaii’s claims – and they had no bearing on the case.
“The landlord is not allowed to subject her to and participate in elder abuse,” Dachtera told The Washington Post. She claimed the couple had cut off electricity and water and Champoux did not even have a key to the apartment.
Hament and Scarola, a managing partner at the Manhattan boutique law firm Scarola Zubatov Schaffzin PLLC, did not respond to messages Tuesday.
