The conviction earlier this week of a former landlord in Columbus, Ohio, who sexually harassed a Black female tenant and coerced her into sexual favors in exchange for rent highlights the larger trend of sexual housing harassment against women of color.
Kevin Baker, 73, was sentenced to two years in prison on July 27 after pleading guilty to a third-degree felony for intimidation.
The identity of the female victim was not released. A statement released by the Muskingum County Prosecutor’s Office shows that Baker used to make racist comments about her being Black and racial slurs like the N-word to refer to the victim.
Comprehensive research on sexual harassment in housing is sparse. One 2008 Georgia State University study found that 68% of the reported victims were Black while virtually all of the perpetrators were White men. The study’s author, Griff Tester, analyzed 137 housing sexual harassment complaints made to the Ohio Civil Rights Commission between 1990 and 2003.
A 2018 pilot study by the University of Missouri School of Law found that nine of the 10 women who were victims of housing sexual harassment were Black or biracial, and one was White.
This type of sexual harassment and coercion is difficult to criminally charge since many of the cases go unreported or misreported, according to research by the National Fair Housing Alliance. Landlords will often use intimidation tactics and threats to scare women into not reporting the sexual harassment.
In the Baker case, he threatened the victim if she ever reported him, according to the Muskingum County Prosecutor’s Office. “I’m a retired cop,” he said. “I got pull in this town. If you don’t do what I say I’m [not] cancelling this eviction.”
The National Fair Housing Alliance found that government agencies and nonprofit fair housing organizations received 162 complaints of housing sexual harassment in 2024. Researchers noted that the actual rate of housing sexual harassment is much higher than what complaint data suggest. There may have been more than 4,000 instances of housing sexual harassment in 2024, according to an analysis by researchers at the Thurgood Marshall Institute.
Nia Warren and Sandhya Kajeepeta, Ph.D., researchers at the Legal Defense Fund recommend that policymakers “enact tenant protections to secure low-income Black women’s access to housing even in the face of sexual harassment.”
