GILROY
– The Adult Social Forum may have left Gilroy for good all the
way back in February, but it took until April for the case to be
officially closed. Now, the owner of the property where the club
operated simply hopes to move on.
GILROY – The Adult Social Forum may have left Gilroy for good all the way back in February, but it took until April for the case to be officially closed. Now, the owner of the property where the club operated simply hopes to move on.
County Investigator Jim Lanz asked the Santa Clara County Court in San Martin to drop charges of having a club not legally zoned for the property against Ilyas Absar, the owner of an adobe-style home at 2670 Dryden Avenue in unincorporated Gilroy which served as the home for the Forum for nearly three months. The fine would have cost Absar $280 including the court fees.
“I just dismissed it; I figured he had been through enough,” said Lanz, who added that he felt Absar really didn’t know what he was getting into when he offered a three-year lease to the Forum Owner Deena Luce. “Maybe he didn’t do enough investigation when he got into the contract with the club.”
Absar said that while the unwanted matter of having a partner-swapping sex club on his property is over, he is still feeling the effects.
“Everything is slowly getting back to normal. It’s unfortunate how it happened,” he said. “I came out the loser on both sides.”
While the club vacated the Dryden home more than a month ago, it left Absar paying attorney’s fees, an outrageous bill for cleaning and fixing up a home that now has a tarnished record and a bill from the real estate company that marketed the home and named Luce as a prospective buyer.
“I didn’t find them,” said Absar, who owns several properties in Gilroy and in other Bay Area cities. “I listed the property through a real estate agent, and they brought them to me.”
Absar said that when Luce first talked about renting the property, she told him it was for a social club for adults.
“She said it was an alternative to going to the bar, a place for people to meet,” he said. “Social club can mean a lot of things.”
Luce promised Absar that the club wouldn’t create too much noise and that there wouldn’t be any problems. However, Absar told Luce that if she was given notices from police for noise that he would end the lease. However, the Los Altos resident didn’t know exactly what was happening on his Dryden property until he received a phone call from an angry neighbor.
“I first heard about it from a neighbor who called me,” Absar said. “But I couldn’t act until the county actually put it in writing. Once that happened, I think I got them out as quickly as possible under the circumstances.”
Lanz said that Absar was cooperative.
“From the time I contacted him, he did everything he could reasonably do,” he said.
While the neighbors on Dryden continued to voice their frustrations with the club, Absar remained quiet, choosing not to speak with The Dispatch or speak publicly about the club. Absar said it was important not to say anything bad about the club because it would be easy for Luce to claim that she was being illegally evicted and stretch the progress out over several months.
“I think I got results better than anyone expected,” Absar said.
However, when the lease was broken, Luce, who was granted permission to repaint the house and make changes as she saw fit as long as the home was restored when the lease ended, no longer had to clean up all the alterations that were made to the house to make it look like a club. Absar was left with a $10,000 bill to redo the floors, repaint the walls and make the house look proper to live in again.
“I’m just cleaning it out and fixing it up,” Absar said. “I haven’t really decided what to do. At first I wanted to sell the property and move on. I may still do that; I feel there’s bad history about this.
“I’m wondering with the property having a bad name if I will get another renter or not.”
Absar also has had to regain a good relationship with the neighbors who live on Dryden. He said that he remembers many neighbors giving him unfriendly stares and dirty looks during a neighborhood meeting two months ago, and that some of them had incorporated him as a member of the swinger’s club.
Absar said that since the club left, he has had a better response from the neighborhood, including one neighbor who came over and mowed the grass in the front yard as a sign of goodwill.
