The Eviction of Mary Filan: When The Trump Organisation Ousted a Widow from Her Home
Updated: Aug 2
For more than 30 years, Mary Filan lived in Apartment 6B at 143-15 Barclay Avenue in Flushing, Queens. She was 74, widowed, and semi-paralysed from a recent stroke, getting by on Social Security and a small telephone company pension that added up to less than $500 a month. Her rent stayed under $200, which was the only reason she could still afford to live alone. On the afternoon of Friday, April 25, 1980, that changed for good.
Three men and a truck
Filan was still in bed when the doorbell started ringing. She rarely got up unless she had to, so it rang and rang until she finally made it to the door, and the moment she opened it, three large men pushed past her into the apartment. They went straight for the kitchen, pulling out drawers and dumping the contents into moving cartons. Acting on behalf of City Marshal Norman Katz and accompanied by police, the men spent the next stretch of the afternoon clearing out her sofa, chairs, television, jewellery, dishes and silverware, loading it all onto a truck outside. When they left, the only thing in the apartment was a laundry hamper for her to sit on. An eviction notice was pinned to the front door on behalf of her landlord, the Trump Organisation.
Filan maintained she wasn't behind on rent. She said the most recent bill she'd gotten from Trump was for $10.20, and that she'd already paid it. Her theory, shared by neighbours who described her as quiet and well liked, was simpler than any dispute over a $10 balance: her rent-controlled apartment was worth roughly double what she was paying on the open market, and getting her out meant a new tenant paying full price.
A neighbour steps in
Filan initially refused to leave, distressed and confused by what had just happened to her home. It took her neighbour, Bob Hennessy, to talk her into staying temporarily in his apartment while her doctor and the city's Human Resources Administration arranged for her admission to Parsons Hospital, where at least she'd have a bed. Hennessy spent days afterward trying and failing to find out where her belongings had actually gone.
Asked about the eviction, a Trump Organisation spokesperson told reporters the Trumps "don't get involved" in individual cases, that decisions like this belonged to the management company, and that the organisation didn't evict people "indiscriminately." He couldn't explain why a woman who'd caused no trouble and thrown no parties in three decades had ended up on the street with a hamper for a chair, and referred further questions to a number that went unanswered.
Found in a sanitation depot
The story was broken by Village Voice reporter Joe Conason, and when he followed up a few weeks later, the details got worse. After the initial coverage embarrassed the company, a Trump representative visited Filan at Parsons Hospital and offered her a replacement apartment, not in Queens where she'd spent her whole adult life, but in Orange, New Jersey.
Meanwhile, Filan's social worker Mickey Ridlon and Hennessy had tracked down her actual belongings at a Sanitation Department depot in Woodside, dumped there and largely destroyed. An aide to a Manhattan councilman who saw the wreckage said glasses, plates and pictures were smashed and piled into boxes, and that all her furniture had been broken. Ridlon called it a horror show, and said 31 years of a home had been undone in a couple of hours. Filan also discovered several items were simply missing, including a watch left to her by her late husband and, more consequentially, her rent receipts, the paperwork that could have proven she wasn't actually behind.
One city social services official told reporters he'd never seen an eviction handled this way in 25 years on the job, since evictions weren't normally carried out on Friday afternoons, in bad weather, or against bedridden tenants. This one checked all three boxes: a Friday, at 5 p.m., in the rain.
What the record actually shows
Filan's case briefly drew the attention of her congressman, Ben Rosenthal, though what came of that inquiry isn't clear from the surviving coverage, and neither is what Filan ultimately decided about the New Jersey apartment or whether she ended up in an adult home instead. The trail on her personal life goes cold not long after 1980.
The story resurfaced heavily online in 2025 and again in 2026, prompting fact-checkers at Snopes to look into it twice. They found the underlying reporting was real and published in the Voice in 1980, but couldn't independently verify every detail, since Conason no longer has his original files from a 45-year-old story. Conason told Snopes his original reporting had been extensive, including interviews with Filan herself, her neighbour, her attorney, her social worker, and city officials, plus a comment from the Trump Organisation itself, and that nothing about the story contradicts everything else that's been documented about Trump's record as a landlord.
Worth flagging separately: when the story recirculated again in April 2026, one version of the old newspaper clipping making the rounds online showed signs of AI manipulation, blurred text and inconsistent fonts that didn't match the original Voice layout. That doesn't make the underlying reporting untrue, Conason's actual 1980 story is real and stands on its own, but it's a useful reminder to check where a viral screenshot actually came from before treating it as a primary source.
Not an isolated case
That record is long. In 1981, Trump paid $13 million for 100 Central Park South and the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, planning to demolish both and replace them with a tower. Getting the roughly 80 rent-controlled residents out proved harder than getting rid of the hotel guests, so his managing company allegedly leaned on tactics like constant unwanted calls about other properties, stripped light fixtures, an unkempt lobby, and aluminium foil taped over windows facing the park to make the building look abandoned. The tenants hired a lawyer, fought back for years, and won: a judge threw out Trump's $105 million countersuit against them, and he dropped the demolition plans in 1986. Asked about it later, Trump described the wealthy holdouts as having "a very low threshold for pain," a fairly candid explanation of what he thought the fight had really been about.
Around the same period, a tenant named Anderson Clipper was sued by Trump for unpaid rent despite having a cancelled cheque proving he'd paid. The judge, Jay Stuart Dankberg, dismissed the case, ruled Trump had been trying to harass Clipper, and ordered a 5 percent rent refund, remarking that most landlords are happy just collecting rent without a fight, but Trump seemed to want something more.
Mary Filan wasn't a wealthy Central Park South holdout with a lawyer on retainer. She was a bedridden widow on a fixed income with no legal team and, after the movers were through with her apartment, no proof of her own innocence. Her case reads less like an outlier in Trump's history as a New York landlord and more like the version of that same pattern that played out on tenants who had the least power to fight back, among them Vera Coking, another widow who refused to sell her Atlantic City home to Trump and eventually won, and tenants of Fred Trump, whose own real estate empire the Trump Organisation was built on top of.
The subsidies underneath it all
At the time of Filan's eviction, the Trump Organisation had already collected more than $800,000 for brokering a convention centre deal and roughly $160 million in tax exemptions for renovating the old Commodore Hotel into what became the Grand Hyatt. Filan's hospital stay, by contrast, was covered by Medicare and Medicaid. The same public purse that helped underwrite Trump's developments also ended up paying to pick up the pieces after one of his companies evicted a disabled widow into the street.
