Spying-landlord suit goes to trial

ROCKVILLE — Dennis Van Dusen told the tenant in his Chevy Chase house in early 2012 he would be installing a smoke detector in her room.

“I guess I didn’t tell her all the details,” he said in a videotaped deposition taken in August and played Monday in Montgomery County Circuit Court.

Chief among those details was this: The smoke detector contained a hidden camera he used to spy on the tenant, who, along with her ex-boyfriend, is suing Van Dusen for damages in a civil lawsuit.

Van Dusen, 64, was sentenced in July to five years’ probation and ordered to pay a $2,500 fine after pleading guilty in April to three counts of visual surveillance with prurient intent.

The civil lawsuit, filed in December 2012, seeks $500,000 in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damage.

In opening statements, the landlord’s lawyer did not deny the taping but did question the amount of damages claimed.

The plaintiff had lived in Van Dusen’s house since Jan. 1, 2012, and changed rooms that May, according to the complaint in the lawsuit. That October, she and her boyfriend noticed a pinhole in the smoke detector directly above her bed, took the smoke detector apart, discovered the camera and called police.

A police search of Van Dusen’s computers and hard drives found sexually explicit images of many tenants, including the plaintiff.

Donna E. McBride, the plaintiff’s lawyer, said in her opening statement Monday that experts described Van Dusen’s office space as a “NASA control room” in its technological sophistication, and that he edited some explicit videos together and stored them in a hard drive on his computer labeled “Keep.”

The tenant, then 25 years old, moved into the house after seeing Van Dusen’s ad on Craigslist; he promised a “quiet neighborhood” and “family atmosphere,” said McBride. Van Dusen made some inappropriate comments to her but she brushed them off, McBride said.

“She didn’t suspect a camera but was nervous about his demeanor,” said McBride, a partner with Miller, Miller & Canby Chtd. in Rockville.

The tenant had been seeing a psychiatrist and taking anxiety medication prior to moving into Van Dusen’s house, and the discovery of the camera “again pushed her over the edge,” McBride said. The couple moved in with the boyfriend’s mother, north of Hagerstown; the tenant lost her jobs, was unable to find new employment and eventually moved to California, the lawyer said.

The tenant’s ex-boyfriend, also represented by McBride, started seeing a psychologist because he thought he should have found the camera sooner, according to the lawyer.

“He realized he was being spied upon by a pervert,” McBride said. “It was emasculating.”

Due Tran, Van Dusen’s lawyer, said in his opening statement that his client has accepted responsibility for his actions but asked the jury of three men and three women to keep the alleged damages in perspective.

“Assess what was caused by taping and what wasn’t,” said Tran, a Virginia lawyer who entered his appearance Monday morning.

Tran said Van Dusen took on tenants because he needed help paying the mortgage, and that the smoke detector camera worked automatically because of a motion detector.

“You’re not going to hear testimony of him sitting behind his computer all day long,” Tran said.

Van Dusen sat expressionless in court Monday as his August deposition was projected on a screen over his shoulder. Van Dusen, who was representing himself at the time, said he used the cameras for surveillance because his Marine Corps training instilled in him a “very strong obligation” to protect people.

“How that manifests itself is sometimes strange,” he said. “Sometimes things go off the rail.”

Van Dusen did not know how many videos he had (Montgomery County detectives later testified they reviewed 155) but he strongly denied ever seeing the tenant and her boyfriend being physically intimate. Police also do not believe he shared the videos online.

Van Dusen has multiple master’s degrees from Harvard University and graduated from the University of the District of Columbia‘s law school in 2009, according to a transcript posted on his personal website. The Maryland Court of Appeals admitted Van Dusen to the state bar Oct. 5, 2012, despite receiving an unfavorable report from the 7th Judicial Circuit, which includes all of Southern Maryland.

Judge Joseph A. Dugan Jr. used Van Dusen’s law degree against him in denying Tran’s pretrial motion to exclude testimony from the tenant’s psychiatrist.

Dugan said Van Dusen had received the tenant’s medical records but did not file a motion to compel production of the psychiatrist’s opinions.

“I’m not going to let you lay back and do nothing and then bushwhack counsel on the day of trial,” Dugan said.

The trial is scheduled to continue Tuesday. A fraudulent conveyance count against Van Dusen and his ex-wife, stemming from a recent deed in which he put her name on the house, was dismissed before the start of the trial.

A separate civil lawsuit against Van Dusen filed by another tenant is scheduled for trial at the end of February.

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