"On the regular occasions when we could not find a single glass in the kitchen, we knew that we could find them all in [Cherkis'] room, filled with cigarette butts."

---What six of Jason Cherkis’ housemates had to say about him in a letter to Erik Wemple, after Cherkis wrote an "expose" of his landlord and his housemates in April, 2004 in the City Paper.

Circumlocutor, DCeiver and Wonkette have recently detailed how Erik Wemple has turned the Washington City Paper into a vehicle for carrying out his and his reporters’ personal vendettas.

In the latest episode, I bring you the story of how Jason Cherkis took revenge on his landlord -- and more than a half dozen housemates -- because his landlord wanted to raise his rent and his housemates wanted him to be rid of him.

Most of us would have simply packed up and moved on! But Jason "I’m a fucking reporter" Cherkis works/writes for City Paper. Under the tutelage of Erik Wemple, Jason Cherkis did a Wemplesque thing: He wrote a City Paper "expose" of his own landlord and housemates. Of particular target was his landlord, named Ray.

Cherkis himself writes that, as a tenant, he targeted his landlord for harassment. Cherkis wrote in his "expose" what he would do to when he was mad at his landlord or housemates:

"I went to my room and blasted some angry tunes. This was my latest strategy, something that had worked on the other roommates. Rites of Spring or Sonic Youth would surely have him bowing to my every command. I would extend my private jam sessions late into the night just to make the point."

Cherkis’ insolent behavior was probably not too different from any other teenager, except for the fact that he was well into his thirties when the incident took place. Cherkis’ housemates did not take too well to this, and asked him to move. Cherkis refused, and then continued his harassment of his landlord and housemates through the pages of City Paper.

The story that appeared contained not a single comment from Cherkis’ landlord or housemates. After the article appeared, his landlord and housemates were more intent than ever to see Cherkis pack his bags and -- with his twin brother, Todd -- move out.

Cherkis saw this, however, as an opportunity: as a means to get out of paying rent. He demanded that he be given free rent for part of his remaining time in exchange for moving out.

The poor landlord, Ray, in order to get rid of Cherkis, had to ask for the intervention of Cherkis’ father to have Cherkis and his twin brother finally leave the home. As for Cherkis’ twin brother, the landlord, actually had to pack up all of his all stuff and drive them somewhere else to get him to leave.

One housemate recalled the nightmare of having to live with Cherkis and his twin brother this way: "They were these two kids from Rockville, who were determined to have their `authentic’ urban experience. They ate hummus, and went to neighborhood dive bars, and went around saying `fuck’ and `shit’ and `cool’ in every sentence they spoke. Jason would walk around in this little gray sweatshirt and torn jeans ensemble.

"They were like rebelling against their parents by moving to the inner city, but every time they got into trouble they had their parents in Rockville to bail them out. There was some sort of arrested development thing going on with them as well."

The same housemate said that he and his fellow housemates took to referring to Cherkis and his twin brother simply as "the Cherki": "We meant that like they were like some bacterial infection that had to be repelled."

Among other things left out of his article was that Cherkis invited into the house, without the approval of the others that lived there, the girlfriend of a guy serving time in federal prison, who Cherkis was trying to exploit information for a book he wanted to write: "He would go around and say that this woman was his ticket out of his crumby job at the City Paper, and he was going to be the next Truman Capote. Then he complained that some other writer had stolen the idea from him. It was all too strange and creepy."

The police were also repeatedly called to the household. In one instance, Cherkis screamed repeatedly at a Hispanic neighbor for having, as Cherkis after having got into an altercation, as Cherkis said in his City Paper article, with "a tyrant neighbor [who had] caught me dumping trash in his Supercan."

Cherkis, according to one housemate, started yelling at the neighbor, "I’m really going to fuck your shit up" over and over again. Cherkis didn’t understand, said the housemate, "that it is one thing to yell stuff like that at one of your junior high school buddies in the parking lot of a Seven-Eleven in Rockville, and another to yell something like that at someone in Mount Pleasant."

Despite demands by Cherkis that the neighbor be arrested, the police left with a warning to Cherkis to leave his neighbors alone in the future.

In another instance, if Cherkis’ article is to be believed, a fellow housemate named Kevin pummeled Cherkis’ twin brother, Todd, for no good reason at all. Kevin was indeed arrested for hitting Todd. According to Cherkis’ City Paper account, his brother was entirely the victim. Moreover, Todd, while being hit, was somehow Ghandiesque.

Cherkis’ housemates tell a different story. They say that the housemate lived in a basement room underneath where Cherkis and his brother had their all-night jam sessions to harass their landlord and their housemates. Kevin had a security job with a federal agency where he had to be up at the crack of dawn for work. The nighttime noise left him without sleep -- week after week -- until he eventually snapped, broke and hit Cherkis’ brother.

While Cherkis’ housemates hardly condoned their fellow housemate hitting Cherkis’ twin, they found themselves gnashing their teeth when Cherkis renewed his and his twin brother’s assault against Kevin -- this time in the pages of City Paper. Cherkis wrote of Kevin in his article: "Kevin... had lived in the basement of our house for eight years and so rarely came up for air that we just knew him as the Lonely Guy and diligent house narc."

"It’s like Jason harassed Kevin in real life, and then he continued to harass him in the City Paper," said one housemate. "When we complained, he scoffed at one of us and said, `Haven’t you heard of the fucking freedom of the press, asshole?’"

But when six of Cherkis’ roommates submitted a letter to the editor of the City Paper, in an attempt to defend their landlord, Cherkis had other ideas regarding freedom of the press. Cherkis fought them tooth and nail, making all sorts of complaints and badgering them to withdraw the letter, and even change parts of it. If they didn’t bend to his wishes, and do so, perhaps he might move back into their house and play Sonic Boom or Rites of Spring at top volume late into the night. Or perhaps he would write another expose on them all in the City Paper.

The housemates were met with the same resistance of other subjects of City Paper stories, who had been denied the opportunity to fully answer articles that appear about themselves. One of them, Gloria Borland, as Patrick Gavin has detailed, was so frustrated that they would not publish her letter, that she started her own blog and published her response to their article herself. Read more about it.

Unfortunately for Cherkis, one of the housemates was an attorney, and demanded that the letter be published. The authors of the letter fittingly called themselves Brad Hicks, et. al.

As a public service, and to give Cherkis’ housemates their say, Circulocutor prints their letter below in its entirety.

From the April 18, 2003 edition of City Paper:

Bringing Down the House
By Brad Hicks, et. al.

It's shameful that the City Paper provides a platform for the slanderous rant of staff member Jason Cherkis ("It's a Shame About Ray," 4/4). Too-cool-for-rules-in-the-house-or-the-'hood Cherkis is apparently too lazy to leave the confines of the house to pursue a real story, or to bother interviewing past housemates for this one. So readers are left with his view of his struggle to protect his adolescent right to be irresponsible.

We all lived in Ray's house, some from the early '90s until 2000, others in the late '90s and after 2000, and we all lived with Cherkis. The reality that we saw is very different from the one described in the article. For a long time, it was a great place to live. As Cherkis correctly stated, Ray kept the rent low and maintained a largely hands-off relationship—asking only that we make some modest effort to keep the place clean and not damage the beautiful hardwood floors that he had refinished. What Cherkis misses in his article, however, is that the Achilles heel of group-house life is that it's easy for a parasite like him to take advantage of the casual environment.

Cherkis forced most of us to play the role of "chore czar" at one point or another. With a roommate as breathtakingly self-absorbed as he, someone has to. In his article, Cherkis admits that he is lazy and slovenly, but that doesn't convey how unpleasant it is to live with him. Too-cool Cherkis was never much for chores, preferring to sit on the front porch and smoke while any kind of housework was going on. On the regular occasions when we could not find a single glass in the kitchen, we knew that we could find them all in his room, filled with cigarette butts.

Maybe we shouldn't have been surprised by Cherkis' behavior—he probably hadn't done many chores during his comfy Rockville upbringing. Maybe we should all feel bad for him. Could it be that he has a lot of pent-up anger because no matter how much he poses, he is still a suburban white boy waiting for life to be handed to him on a silver platter? It is laughable that the City Paper chose to include his personal rant in an issue about gentrification ("We Shall Not Be Moved"), given that many of Mount Pleasant's second- and third-generation residents would consider people like Cherkis to be the vanguard of gentrification.

Given Cherkis' admitted "any tactic" approach in his ongoing battles with Ray (and Kevin), it's not surprising that he would write this article, but why on earth would the City Paper publish it? What kind of journalistic credibility does someone's rant about his personal life have? What kind of factual documentation did the City Paper's editorial staff (or legal staff for that matter) demand from Cherkis before publishing it? And, finally, given that Kevin's trial was scheduled for the Monday following the release of this article, how does the City Paper justify allowing its staff to air such slanderous and clearly manipulative grievances in its pages?

D.C. deserves real journalism, Ray's house deserves better tenants, and Ray deserves an apology from both Jason Cherkis and the City Paper for your article.

Peter Goodman, Oakland, Calif.

Brad Hicks, Athens, Ga.

Dana Holland, Philadelphia

Joel Levin, San Francisco

Adam Mendelson, Chicago

Ann Swinburn, Capitol Hill