Order Denying Debtor’s Motion for Sanctions for Violation of the Automatic Stay. The chapter 7 debtor filed a motion seeking actual damages, attorney fees, and punitive damages against his former landlord under 11 U.S.C. § 362(k), alleging the landlord willfully violated the automatic stay by filing and pursuing a postpetition eviction in state court.
    After the debtor fell behind on rent payments, but before filing a bankruptcy petition, he requested that his property manager file an eviction notice so he could secure financial assistance from a veterans association. The debtor subsequently filed for bankruptcy on September 19, 2025, but failed to include the landlord’s full address in his petition schedules. The landlord filed a summary ejectment action several days later. On a Saturday afternoon, two days before a scheduled Monday morning eviction hearing, the debtor’s attorney contacted the landlord’s property manager by text message, advising her of the bankruptcy filing and potential stay violation regarding the eviction proceeding. At the state court hearing on October 6, following the property manager’s request for eviction and past due rent, the debtor announced his bankruptcy, prompting the judge to issue an administrative stay. Though the landlord ceased its eviction actions, the debtor elected to vacate the property and abandoned his efforts to secure financial assistance from a veterans association.
    Although the landlord’s filing of the eviction action was a technical violation of the automatic stay, the Court found it was not willful given the lack of evidence that the landlord received notice of the bankruptcy case prior to pursuing eviction. The text message from the debtor’s attorney to the property manager was sufficient, however, to find the landlord had actual notice of the bankruptcy filing prior to the eviction hearing on October 6. As a result, the landlord’s request for eviction and past due rent at the hearing constituted a willful violation of the automatic stay.
    Nevertheless, the Court denied the debtor’s request for sanctions and damages. Punitive damages were unwarranted because the landlord’s conduct was not egregious or vindictive. The debtor also failed to provide any evidence of actual damages proximately caused by the stay violation other than attorney fees and legal expenses in prosecuting the motion. The Court declined to award nominal damages and attorney fees given the manufactured nature of damages and the debtor’s lack of due diligence. The Court observed that (1) the landlord initiated the eviction proceeding at the debtor’s request, which the debtor abandoned after the hearing; (2) the debtor’s own misaddressing errors left the landlord without written notice; and (3) the debtor and his counsel waited five days to contact the landlord after receiving the eviction notice, doing so by text message to the property manager on a Saturday, two days before the scheduled Monday morning hearing. The Court found that, having created the conditions in which the property manager made an appearance at a hearing for an ejectment action filed at the debtor’s request, and despite the administrative stay subsequently imposed, the debtor filed an opportunistic motion for sanctions that misrepresented the landlord's conduct. For those reasons, the Court denied the debtor’s motion for sanctions.