Welllll… sort of, but not directly.
I was sued once in a rent dispute. The tenants of rent-subsidized housing had invited others to live with them to help cut expenses even further than the subsidy did. Naturally, that created more demand for services, parking, subsidized electricity and heat / hot water, etc. I was also invited and eventually moved in. When the facts finally became known to the apartment management (which finally happened after the original tenants decided to move out, and management, thinking the place was now empty, was surprised to find a bunch of nominal squatters living there – even though we were still making the rent payments on time). So they moved to evict us immediately. They came to the apartment one day – when I was the only one at home – and served the eviction notice. At the time they got my name (I was pretty young and naïve at the time – even more so than now). Months later, after I had moved back to live with my parents, I got a court summons with a request for summary judgment. The claim was for the full cost of breaking the lease early, the accumulation of minor wear-and-tear damage to the apartment, cleaning costs and other miscellany. It amounted to a claim of several thousand dollars in damages against just me, since mine was the only name they ever got as an illegal resident. And as you can deduce from the fact that I was living with my parents after quitting college early, I didn’t have that kind of cash – or the money to hire an attorney, either.
When you request a summary judgment as a plaintiff (which the apartment manager had done) you do it when you feel that the facts to support your own case are so voluminous, obvious and clear-cut to be an open-and-shut case in support of a decision in your favor, and for the full dollar amount of the claim, as long as the documentation is in place and there’s no good response from the defendant. Not knowing any better, I simply wrote a point-by-point factual response to each of the managers’ legal points, and mailed that to the Clerk of Courts where the summary judgment had been requested. The case was dropped a week or so later, and I’ve never heard another word about it.
The funny thing was that I agreed then – and still agree – that the apartment manager should have been reimbursed for most of those things (some of them were overkill, which also damaged their case, I think), only not solely from me, which was the point of most of my response. Apparently the court agreed.