By MELODY SIMMONS and FERN SHEN
Donna Hanks’ history of trouble making house payments, ripe for the picking on public databases, hit the blogosphere over the weekend like sirloin in a piranha tank. The tart-tongued East Baltimore grandmother is firing back, meanwhile, and ACORN is defending its vetting process.
UPDATES: Hanks is arrested and charged with 4th degree burglary (Baltimore Sun 2/25/09) ACORN activist who helped Hanks break into her old house is arrested. (Baltimore Sun 2/23/09) City Council considers bill to slow evictions (Baltimore Sun 2/24/09)
PLUS: Video of the break-in.
In an interview yesterday, Hanks recalls being puzzled that ACORN picked her, over others with a more compelling story: ”I said, ‘Why don’t you use the lady with 47 years in her house?’ But they did me first.”
Still, Hanks think she deserves sympathy and, though she may not have a computer to respond to her Internet critics, she had some choice words for them. “I don’t care. I’ll attack ‘em right back,” she said. “My humanitarian rights have been violated. My rights are violated. If they want to talk, they should open up their wallet and send me a gift so I can get on with my life. They are p****** me off because they are digging on me, kicking me to the curb mentally.”
Media scrum mobilized
Hanks suddenly found herself in the limelight Thursday. Her story was told in the Huffington Post, on the nationally syndicated NPR show “The Takeaway” and on local Baltimore television and radio. Reporters from WYPR, WEAA, WJZ, WMAR and others were there with cameras and notebooks Thursday, recording the moment when activists wielding bolt-cutters broke into Hanks’ old home at 315 South Ellwood near Patterson Park. In six other U.S. cities, ACORN staged the same act of civil disobedience, as part of its “Home Defenders” campaign, fighting back against what they called fraudulent foreclosures.
Everyone reported pretty much what ACORN told them, which is that Hanks lost her home to foreclosure six months ago, after the adjustable rate mortgage she took out in 2001 caused her payments to balloon to nearly $2,000 a month – well above her ability to pay on a banquet worker’s salary from a downtown hotel.
The next day, television reporters told Hanks the bank had already sold her house and the new owner was considering filing trespassing charges.
Then on Sunday, comments by a poster going by versions of the name sherryande or Sherry started popping up on many of the television websites where Hanks’ story had been told and on Michelle Malkin’s website, on The Firearms Forum site and other conservative sites. The comments bristled with details and dates allegedly showing property transactions, a previous foreclosure, a bankruptcy, court records from both sides of the docket. Accurate? Fair? Relevant? Didn’t matter, up it went.
Grist for national debate on foreclosure
People will argue about whether the facts suggest Hanks was gaming the system (Malkin) or victimized by unscrupulous lenders (ACORN), but there is definitely more material to pick over now.
In a phone interview, Hanks confirmed much of what was in the now-widespread post. Yes, she said, she bought the home in 2001 for $87,000 and then in 2005 refinanced it for $270,000.
Hanks said she used the money to pay dental bills, surgery and assorted doctor’s bills at a time when she had no money.
Yes, Hanks said, there was an earlier foreclosure on the house in May 2006 and she filed for bankruptcy the next month and, as part of that, a payment plan was set up for the more than $10,000 she owed on her mortgage.
Hanks contests other details, including whether she was wrong on the bankruptcy papers to list her monthly salary as $1,625 (“it occasionally got that high!”) or extra income from unspecified side jobs as bringing in an additional $1,275.
“We vetted her”
ACORN officials said they still believe Donna is a victim of the foreclosure crisis and said they knew most of what was posted about her on the Internet.
“We vetted her story,” said Acorn organizer Joe Cox. “We know pretty well for a fact what happened with her loan.”
Cox said loan brokers took advantage of Hanks’ naivete.
“What was clear was they were giving her a loan that, from the second she signed it, it was going to go into foreclosure – with an adjustable interest rate, a lack of escrow and a complete over-value of the property,” Cox said. “I think that for Donna there was more information out there to have had, but she doesn’t have a law degree to read through the fine print. Like all of our victims, she thought these loan brokers shared her interest in giving her a loan they thought she was going to be able to pay them back.”
“Like a detective without a gun!”
“Naivete? That’s no excuse!” said “sherryande,” who identified herself as Sherry Anderson, of Havre de Grace, a laid-off real estate researcher with time on her hands and mad database skills.
Anderson said in a phone interview that she didn’t know Hanks, but dug into her history because the story made her angry.
“I’m just a citizen who was p***** off that I should have to pay for irresponsible behavior. I wanted to get the word out,” said Anderson, who also popped up during the election with comments about Barack Obama’s citizenship.
Drawing on the skills she acquired in her work doing real estate due diligence, Anderson said it took her about an hour and a half to pull together a dossier on Hanks property transactions, foreclosures, litigation and refinancing.
Anderson works out of her home as a consultant and said she let some of her paying work slide yesterday to poke around the public record on one of the local ACORN activists.
“I’m like a detective without a gun!”
