KVETCH-ALL: Ralph Charell (above) and ex-girlfriend Avril Brenig (below). (
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This world-record complainer has a major gripe.
Ralph Charell, the 83-year-old author of “How I Turn Ordinary Complaints into Thousands of Dollars: The Diary of a Tough Customer,” says a woman he met on Match.com “induced” him into giving up his rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper East Side.
Despite promising Charell a place to stay “for the rest of his life,” 73-year-old Avril Brenig booted him from her Upper West Side apartment less than a month after he moved in, court papers say.
Now the man who once claimed the title of “Most Successful Complainer” in the Guinness Book of World Records has been forced to move into an “inferior” apartment in Astoria, and he’s suing Brenig, 73, for “elder abuse.”
“It’s really very, very sad,” said Charell’s lawyer, James Mahon. “To give up a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City is a terrible thing.”
Brenig, who has a Ph.D. in public health from Columbia and does Tarot readings, said she never promised Charell he could stay indefinitely. And she said she had to dump him because he was “impossible” to live with.
“He had anger issues, and was railing against all sorts of people and got into disputes with people all the time,” she said.
The suit says the pair met online in March, and were soon involved in an “intimate, romantic relationship.”
Brenig convinced Charell to move into her three-bedroom co-op in October, and “repeatedly” assured him that “in the unlikely event their romantic relationship did not work out, he could reside in the middle apartment” and “that under no circumstances would he be asked to vacate,” the suit says.
When she was concerned that he had too much stuff for her apartment, he “abandoned much of his personal property, including furniture, books and paintings,” the suit says.
It apparently wasn’t enough for Brenig — shortly after he moved in, she told him his remaining stuff “was disturbing the ‘feng shui’ and ‘chi’ of the apartment and she no longer wanted to cohabitate with him,” the suit says.
Charell — who claims to have earned over $400,000 worth of free belongings with his complaining — refused to leave. Brenig had a playwright/poet/composer/lawyer friend named Julian Lowenfeld try to “mediate” their differences, the suit says. After a week of negotiations, Lowenfeld said he was acting as Brenig’s lawyer and had called police to force Charell out. A police report says Charell left voluntarily.
The suit says he left with one suitcase and checked into a hotel, where he thought he was having a heart attack. He was diagnosed with a rapid heartbeat, palpitations and hypertension, conditions he didn’t have before the eviction, it says.
Lowenfeld denied he’d ever told Charell he was an independent mediator, and said that Brenig was right to kick him out — because he’s a “nightmare.”
He said that he’d moved into Brenig’s apartment with 99 boxes, and several suitcases and file cabinets. “Boxes were everywhere,” Brenig said.
Lowenfeld, who is also named as a defendant in the suit, said he and Brenig deny any wrongdoing, and will fight the charges.
“If he was the least bit of a gentleman, he’d thank her for paying his moving and storage expenses,” he said.