The Justice Department is investigating more than a dozen cases of landlords accused of sexually harassing their tenants. CBS News' Scott MacFarlane has more details.

Washington

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating more than a dozen cases of alleged sexual harassment by landlords against female tenants in states including New York, Kansas, Michigan, and Minnesota. These cases involve landlords accused of leveraging their control over housing or repairs to extort sexual favors, which constitutes both criminal behavior and a violation of the Federal Housing Act.

The DOJ Civil Rights Division is pursuing civil penalties and damages for the victims, many of whom are low-income families with limited housing alternatives. Despite significant staff cuts within the division, officials report that the investigative team handling housing sexual harassment cases remains stable due to recent hiring efforts.

DOJ investigating cases of alleged sexual harassment by landlords

The Department of Justice is investigating more than a dozen cases of sexual harassment by landlords against female tenants. The cases span multiple states, including New York, Kansas, Michigan, and Minnesota. So let's go live to CBS News Justice Correspondent Scott McFarlane. Scott, thank you for joining us today. What more can you tell us about this case? The RCBS News Review found a scourge of these federal sex harassment cases, civil cases filed against major landlords in different communities across America, with a piece of connective tissue between the cases. Landlords accused of leveraging their ability to withhold housing or withhold repairs to try to extort women to return sexual favors for their housing. This is criminal behavior. In some cases, it's also a civil violation of the Federal Housing Act, which prohibits harassment of tenants in housing across America. And what our case review found was that the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division is trying to exact civil penalties against some of these alleged sexually harassing landlords and damages for the victims, a real sensitive issue here because these are in many cases low-income families who are being threatened with their housing with no alternative as they're being sexually harassed or commandeered by the landlords. Wow. It's just so sad to hear those details there. Scott, how have recent cuts to the federal government affected these investigations, if at all? Yeah, there's been a large set of cuts, a purge, if you will, inside the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, the division that handles these types of cases. I spoke with the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Hamid Dhillon, who tells CBS News that it seems that's a pretty stable part of their division, though, this housing sexual harassment investigative team is still there, and that she's hired roughly 50 people to backfill for the departures. That's really an overall problem for the Department of Justice. They have lost about 5,000 people since the start of the year in an agency of about 100,000. That's going to make a dent on caseload that they're trying to get after right now. Okay. Scott McFarland, thank you so much.

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