Tag: Big Read

The sleek, modern offices of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, sit on the southernmost edge of Independence Square. The enormous glass windows of a conference room called the Marketplace — a nod to the “marketplace of ideas” — perfectly frame Independence Hall.

The view is no coincidence. The free-speech organization, founded in 1999 and long known for decrying illiberalism and so-called cancel culture on American college campuses, is deliberate in the stories it tells.

In addition to the thousands of case submissions FIRE receives each year, staffers scour social media and news reports for compelling free-speech violations, partly looking, as legal director Will Creeley explained, for “cases you can tell a story with.”

For years, FIRE warned about threats to free speech, primarily on college campuses. Now the crisis it was preparing for has arrived.

The issue today is no longer one of cultural differences — students protesting controversial speakers or agitating for more diverse curricula.

Instead, the full power of the federal government is trained on universities and individual students who disagree with it. The stakes have grown exponentially, as became clear early on when federal agents detained Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University Ph.D. student on a visa, after she cowrote an op-ed in a student newspaper. She then spent 45 days in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in Louisiana. (FIRE submitted an amicus brief in Ozturk’s ongoing federal case, in which a federal judge ruled last month that the administration had no grounds to deport her.)

More recently, federal agents arrested and charged journalist and former CNN anchor Don Lemon with federal civil rights crimes for his coverage of an anti-ICE protest inside a Minnesota church. Of his arrest, the organization wrote, “FIRE will be watching closely.”

The question FIRE faces today is whether it can effectively meet the moment, and overcome skepticism from the left and from other free-speech advocates, some of whom argue the group helped lay the groundwork for an authoritarian crackdown.

Those critics say the present free-speech crisis is partly the predictable result of FIRE stoking a conservative panic over campus politics, effectively handing the federal government a well-crafted rationale for suppressing progressive voices.

FIRE’s leaders say they were not wrong before about cancel culture. Things were bad, they argue. But this is far worse.

“The threats we’re seeing right now, to me, often feel damn near existential,” Creeley, 45, said in a recent interview. “The incredibly important distinction is that what we’re seeing now from the right is backed by the power of the federal government.”

When the government becomes the censor

It can sometimes feel as if FIRE has been involved in nearly every major free-speech flash point of the last year — part of an intentional strategy to build the organization’s profile and raise awareness about speech violations, said Alisha Glennon, 41, the group’s chief operating officer.

Among dozens of ongoing cases, FIRE is suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio in federal court over the administration’s targeting of international students who reported on or participated in pro-Palestinian campus activism.

FIRE has also been outspoken in its defense of Harvard University. After the Trump administration sent Harvard a list of demands this spring — including banning some international students based on their views, appointing an outside overseer approved by the federal government to ensure “viewpoint diversity,” and submitting yearly reports to the government — the university refused to comply. Trump then sought to cut off billions of dollars of federal funding in response.

Harvard sued, and FIRE submitted an amicus brief supporting the university, noting that because of its own “longstanding role as a leading critic” of Harvard as a center of cancel culture, it was not less but more alarmed by the government’s “wielding the threat of crippling financial consequences like a mobster gripping a baseball bat.”

FIRE is also preparing to potentially sue Texas A&M University after the university instructed a philosophy professor in January to remove some teachings of Plato from an introductory philosophy course, citing new rules barring public universities in the state from offering classes that “advocate race or gender ideology.” FIRE wrote to the university, calling the move “unconstitutional political interference.”

Removing Plato from an intro philosophy class is the type of absurd, taken-to-the-extreme free-speech dispute that has long been FIRE’s bread and butter, and Creeley was particularly agitated about it.

“What the hell is ‘race and gender ideology’?” he said. “That’s a term so vague you could drive a truck through it.”

He had seen commentary about how 2,400 years ago, Socrates was put to death for corrupting the youth of Athens — and now administrators were, in effect, trying to run Socrates’ student out of College Station, Texas, too.

Creeley was almost laughing, but he was also feeling apocalyptic.

He has been half-joking with his staff that FIRE’s entire litigation program could be dedicated just to Texas. Yet he was also stewing over a decision by the University of Alabama in December to suspend two student publications, one focused on fashion and the other on Black culture and student life.

The university said both violated the Justice Department’s guidance on diversity, equity, and inclusion by narrowly appealing to female students and Black students. FIRE sent an outraged letter to the school, often a precursor to litigation.

“It’s one thing to say, ‘Hey, administratively, we’re not going to have an office of DEI,’” Creeley said. But to say, “‘And students can’t talk about these things.’ … That just drives me nuts.”

Off campus, FIRE is suing Perry County, Tenn., on behalf of Larry Bushart, a retired police officer who spent 37 days in jail after reposting a meme following the assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk. The meme depicted then-presidential candidate Donald Trump urging people to “get over” a separate shooting the year before.

Defending free speech is notoriously unpopular, and FIRE has leaned hard into a narrative of itself as a pure, principled defender of free speech, regardless of the consequences.

“We always say we just call balls and strikes, no matter what team is up to bat,” Glennon said. “If you are being criticized by both sides and praised by both sides every single day — well, then, that’s something that I wear as a point of pride.”

“Sometimes, if everybody’s criticizing you, you are screwing up,” Creeley acknowledged, and they both laughed. “But here I would say we’re doing it right.”

From scrappy watchdog to national player

FIRE is insistently nonpartisan; staffers acknowledge the organization’s erstwhile conservative reputation but say it was never accurate.

And under the second Trump administration, it has become one of the most outspoken voices in the country for free expression. The nonprofit has a $32 million budget, about 130 staffers, and roughly 12,000 members paying a $25 annual fee.

Both Creeley and Glennon have been with the organization for nearly two decades, helping it grow from a small advocacy group into one garnering increasing mainstream attention. They said FIRE based itself in Philadelphia, not Washington, so that it would remain free from political interference. (One of the cofounders of the organization, Alan Charles Kors, an emeritus history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is also based in Philly.)

At the Philly office, copies of the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Philanthropy greet visitors. The conference rooms are named after free-speech references. (“It’s a little kitschy, but it’s cute,” Glennon said of the “Crowded Theater” room.)

One afternoon this fall, Glennon, in an oversized tan blazer, black pants, and stilettos, her blond hair loose, and Creeley, in a white button-down and purple tie, his auburn beard neatly cropped, were quick to laugh, prone to peppering famous quotes about free speech throughout the conversation.

They appeared to be true believers — in free expression, in their work, in America.

Glennon said she fears “that people will become accustomed to a society that is less free, and that with every generation, we’re losing a little bit of that love for American exceptionalism and what free speech is.”

Creeley nodded.

“What’s the Kors quote? ‘A nation that does not educate in liberty will not long enjoy it, and won’t even know when it’s lost,’” he said, paraphrasing a quote from FIRE’s cofounder.

“‘Won’t even know when it’s lost,’” Glennon echoed. “Gave me chills.”

From pressure campaigns to the courtroom

FIRE was founded by two civil libertarians who wrote one of the defining campus-panic books of the 1990s, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, which Publishers Weekly at the time described as a polemic about how “the ‘political and cultural left’ is today the worst abuser of the principles of open, equal free speech.”

Creeley joined FIRE as a law school intern before becoming a full-time staffer in 2006. He comes from a long line of pacifist Quakers and was involved in the campus Green Party as an undergrad at New York University. He said he was drawn to First Amendment work because his father was a poet; words were important.

“I remember the first couple years, I was like, ‘Boy, I’m doing this free-speech work, I’m defending an awful lot of evangelical conservative Christians who I really don’t have much in common with,’” Creeley said. But that was the principle of the thing.

Glennon, who was born and raised in Mayfair, joined FIRE around the same time. She had recently graduated from the College of William and Mary and was waitressing while applying for development jobs. “I was like, ‘Free speech! Everybody likes free speech!’” she said, laughing.

For more than a decade, FIRE focused exclusively on advocacy, aiming to “make rights violations so painful for a school that they just would abandon it,” Creeley said. Litigation was plodding and costly, and the awareness campaigns seemed to have an impact.

In 2008, for example, a student-janitor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis was accused of racial harassment after a coworker saw him reading Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan, a nonfiction book that depicted robed Klansman and burning crosses on the cover. FIRE took up the cause, and the university eventually apologized to the janitor.

Other early advocacy cases included defending a professor at a New Jersey community college over a photo he posted of his daughter wearing a Game of Thrones T-shirt, and intervening on behalf of a University of Alaska Fairbanks student newspaper accused of sexual harassment for publishing a satirical article about a new building shaped like a vagina.

Then in 2014, FIRE began suing schools. The effort launched with four cases, including one about an unconstitutional “free speech zone” at a college in California and one on behalf of students at Iowa State University who were told they could not use the university’s name while wearing T-shirts representing their chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

FIRE eventually won all four.

These days, staffers at the ACLU of Pennsylvania and FIRE work closely together, talking weekly and sometimes daily.

“I honestly don’t remember a time where we had a disagreement about how to analyze the case,” said Witold Walczak, the ACLU of Pennsylvania’s legal director.

Despite its ideologically broad legal work, FIRE perhaps became most famous in the mainstream for its conservative-leaning culture work. In 2015, executive director Greg Lukianoff cowrote an Atlantic article — and later a book — titled The Coddling of the American Mind, arguing that efforts to create “safe spaces” on campuses had gone awry. Cowritten with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the book portrayed campus identity politics as bordering on the surreal.

That was also the year Lukianoff helped to disseminate one of the defining “cancel culture” artifacts of the decade. He filmed a Yale student, who came to be known online as “shrieking girl,” screaming at a professor in the middle of a simmering debate on campus over what constituted racially sensitive Halloween costumes. The video made national news, eventually racking up nearly 2 million views on FIRE’s YouTube page.

The rankings — and the reckoning

These days, the organization tracks speaker disinvitations and scholars and students “under fire” through its public databases. Since 2020, it has also published annual “free-speech rankings” based on the databases and student surveys — rankings that have repeatedly placed Harvard at or near the bottom for free speech.

Those efforts underpin one of the central critiques of FIRE: that it has focused not only on government restrictions but also on the actions of private actors, including students.

“The rankings are based on those ideas of ‘cancel culture’ and shaming others and so on. And they’re not based on the First Amendment,” said Charles Walker, a retired attorney based in Maryland who published multiple critiques of FIRE’s rankings last year. “First Amendment law restricts what the government can do with regard to individual speech. It doesn’t address individuals speaking to each other.”

Bradford Vivian, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and the author of Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education, described FIRE’s databases as “totally subjective, arbitrary, politically motivated tools.”

He argued that FIRE cherry-picks sensational incidents that do not necessarily have anything to do with true First Amendment violations, and prioritizes rankings that will make headlines over those that would be more accurate.

“FIRE has produced misinformation that others can easily use for nefarious purposes,” Vivian said.

FIRE for years whipped up a frenzy over liberal excess on elite college campuses, Vivian and other critics say. The Trump administration seized on that frenzy to slash federal funding and even imprison its detractors. Yet FIRE staffers do not see themselves as part of that story.

Even as FIRE insists it merely “calls balls and strikes,” critics note that state legislatures and the Trump administration have cited FIRE’s rankings as justification for punitive actions against universities.

Adding insult to injury, FIRE staffers have not always expressed much sympathy for the universities that now find themselves in the administration’s crosshairs.

“Administrators, colleges, universities have in some ways done plenty to bring this on themselves,” Sean Stevens, FIRE’s chief research adviser, told The Inquirer. “There was a lot of downplaying or ignoring of the concerns about the homogeneity of politics among the professorate or some of the curriculums.”

Still, Stevens, who oversees the annual rankings, said he disagrees with the Trump administration using his work to cut funding or shut down certain speech or academic departments. “That’s not anything we would advocate for,” he said.

In December, Lukianoff doubled down, publishing what amounted to an “I told you so” essay, arguing that universities now face a “worst of both worlds” scenario, in which government pressure combined with lingering cancel-culture dynamics are producing the “bleakest speech landscape imaginable.”

Creeley and Glennon said they never anticipated their work being used to justify repression.

“It’s galling to me to see our work invoked to justify that kind of illiberal crackdown,” Creeley said, pointing specifically to U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), who previously said she was a free-speech ally, using FIRE’s rankings in her anti-higher education campaigns.

If onetime allies now seem to have never cared much about free speech to begin with, that’s not on FIRE, they said.

“What we had been saying over the years was true‚” Glennon said. “We’re to blame now for the government overreach? I don’t think it’s a fair assessment.”

“I mean, that’s all we can do: Call out the abuses as we see them,” Creeley said. “If somebody wants to use our work for bad ends, we’ll fight you on it.”

Can a referee still matter when the rules change?

At FIRE’s daily morning meetings to discuss pressing free-speech problems across the country, the agenda has grown longer. The scope, severity, volume, and nature of the cases they are seeing have changed, Creeley said. (He noted — twice — that an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presidency would likely keep FIRE busy as well.)

“In some places, the law is just getting flat-out ignored,” he said.

After two decades defending the First Amendment, Creeley has begun to reflect on whether placing his faith in the collective commitment to the law and the Constitution was the right choice. Still, he remains an optimist. He believes that such a commitment will prevail. That’s the whole promise of the country.

FIRE continues to see itself as a principled referee. Whether a referee still matters when the most powerful player insists the rules no longer apply — that remains an open question.

More than two dozen Philadelphia-area real estate professionals helped arrange $45 million worth of questionable deals around Temple University in which student rentals that had sat on the market for months abruptly sold for about double their asking prices, an Inquirer investigation has found.

In 52 settled or still-pending sales over roughly the last year, apartment buildings were listed for sale at an average price of $450,000, but found no takers. Within days of being re-listed for a higher price, the same properties sold for as much as $905,000 — at least on paper — to buyers who took out mortgages that far exceeded the original asking price.

Eight sellers or their agents now say they entered into the deals with the understanding that they would actually receive close to the original asking price — not the much higher amount that was officially listed on deeds and other public records. And an appraiser said that real estate agents on both sides of a proposed deal tried to pressure him to raise the valuation of a property.

The sales have raised concerns about possible mortgage fraud in the area around Temple, which could lead to a spate of foreclosures and affect property assessments, tax bills, and student rentals. At least one such property has gone into foreclosure over an unpaid mortgage, according to court records.

Solomon Wisenberg, a former assistant U.S. attorney in North Carolina and Texas who specialized in white-collar crime and bank fraud, said the people involved in the deals could face scrutiny from criminal investigators.

“I don’t know any fraud prosecutor who wouldn’t be interested in looking at that,” Wisenberg said. “Settlement statements have to reflect reality. If you don’t present an accurate picture to the financial institution that is financing the loan, you’ve got problems.”

Patrick C. Fay, a real estate agent in Coldwell Banker’s Old City office, was involved in every deal, representing at least seven buyers who purchased the properties through limited liability companies. One of those buyers had been convicted of an earlier mortgage fraud scheme.

Coldwell Banker cut ties with Fay in December, hours after The Inquirer published a story concerning 33 of his deals around Temple.

But Fay had a counterpart on the other side of every transaction. They included agents at major brokerages such as Keller Williams, Long & Foster, and eXp — as well as three agents who worked in the same Coldwell office as Fay and helped him close 13 sales.

Coldwell Banker’s national office said this month that it has launched an internal investigation into the matter.

Fay, who was one of the top agents in his Coldwell office, has denied wrongdoing. He declined to discuss specific sales.

“In my over 20 years in real estate, I have maintained an unblemished record with no ethical violations or complaints filed against me,” Fay wrote in a text message last week. “These claims are without merit.”

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Steve Orbanek, a spokesperson for Temple University, said the university learned about the situation from The Inquirer’s previous report and is now investigating possible impacts on its student renters.

“It goes without saying that the university condemns any unlawful behavior, and we find these allegations deeply concerning, both for our students and neighbors who reside in the community,” he said.

‘Fat Pay’

Fay, of Moorestown, Burlington County, started arranging deals in December 2024 to purchase apartment buildings around Temple University that owners had been struggling to sell.

The value of those properties, which are largely marketed as student rentals, has fallen in recent years. A local landlords association said vacancy rates are up and rents down amid declining enrollment at the university, which has shed 10,000 students in under a decade.

Fay, who has used the handle “Fat Pay” on social media, had buyers willing to make a deal. However, in multiple cases identified by The Inquirer, that was true only after the sellers and their real estate agents agreed to sign a deed showing that the property had sold for much more than the original asking price.

Shaina Levin, a Coldwell agent who worked with Fay in his Old City office, represented a seller in one such deal on 15th Street. The property was initially listed for sale last July at $375,000. Records show Fay’s client bought it for $842,000 in September 2025 after securing a $673,600 mortgage.

“It’s a bonus when we can keep it in the Coldwell Banker family,” Levin posted on Facebook, referring to the sale. “Thanks Pat Fay for teaming up on this one. Congratulations to your buyer!”

In an interview, Levin said her client received an amount closer to the original listing price, not the $842,0000 sales price recorded on the deed.

She said the buyer contended that the higher sales price was tied to a planned renovation. City permit records show no evidence of construction or renovation work on the building.

Levin said that Fay’s proposal was “totally unconventional,” but that her office manager at Coldwell Banker ran it by the company’s legal department, which signed off.

“Legal said, ‘Yep, all good,’” Levin said. She referred additional questions about the sale to her manager, who declined to comment.

Fay’s buyer in that deal was UrbanNest Acquisitions, a limited liability company created the same month as the sale by Tanjania Powell-Avery, a former real estate agent from Pottstown, Montgomery County. Federal prosecutors with the Eastern District of Pennsylvania indicted Powell-Avery and two others in 2010 for participating in a mortgage fraud ring in the Philadelphia area. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years’ probation and nine months’ house arrest.

Powell-Avery declined to comment.

Two other colleagues of Fay’s at his former Old City office also brokered sales with him, according to data from the Multiple Listing Service, a shared database that real estate professionals use to track and arrange deals.

Karl Klotzbach represented sellers in eight deals with Fay over five months last year — more than any other seller’s agent, records show. The eight properties had originally been listed for a total of $3.4 million before they were each re-listed and sold for a combined $7 million.

Klotzbach did not respond to requests for comment.

Matthew Greene, another Coldwell agent, brokered four sales with Fay on North 12th Street. The properties were each listed for $450,000 last April, then re-listed at $879,000 the following month. In July, each property sold at the higher amount within days of one another, with all four sales backed by a separate $703,200 mortgage.

Greene would not discuss the sales.

“I’m happy to direct you to our legal team for any comment,” he said. Greene hung up the phone without providing any contact information.

Daryl Turner, the branch vice president at Coldwell Banker’s Old City office, referred questions to the company’s legal department. Andrea Gillespie, a national spokesperson for Coldwell Banker, which operates in 49 countries and territories, would not comment on the sales.

“We immediately disaffiliated Pat Fay and are continuing to investigate the matter internally,” Gillespie said in an email. “Coldwell Banker stands for trust and integrity, and we hold our agents to the highest ethical standards.”

‘This is my livelihood’

While sellers were eager to offload their toxic real estate investments, not every deal went smoothly.

John Sexton, an independent licensed appraiser with twenty years’ experience in the Philadelphia market, said in an interview that an appraisal company working for a lender contracted him last year to evaluate a property on North Park Avenue, near Temple’s campus. The sale was being brokered by Fay and Peter Lien, an eXp real estate agent representing the seller.

It was the kind of property common around Temple: a Victorian-era rowhouse that had been converted into a three-unit, nine-bedroom student rental. And, like similar properties in the area, it sat on the market unsold for more than two months, with no takers, at its $408,000 asking price.

The property was taken off the market in October, but then reappeared as a pending sale at $879,000, according to MLS data. Fay had found another buyer ready to pay more than double.

Sexton said he quizzed Lien about why a property that had not undergone recent renovations would suddenly jump in price. Sexton said Lien responded that an earlier broker simply “hadn’t been familiar with the real estate market” around Temple.

Sexton said the implication of these conversations was that Lien “had a person who would pay $879,000, so I should just do my job and mark it at $879,000.”

Sexton said he then received an unusual email from an individual named “Jay Jay,” who indicated he was working with Fay. The email included a list of nearby properties that had all sold in the $800,000 range, establishing that the sales price was reasonable.

Sexton looked into the comparable sales and found that they had all been brokered by Fay. “Jay Jay” also sent Sexton copies of leases for apartments in the same building, purporting to show units leasing for $2,500 a month. But when Sexton dug up sales listings for the same building from a few weeks earlier, they advertised that the units had been leased for closer to half that amount.

“Jay Jay” did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment.

Sexton said he called Fay to discuss the discrepancies, and the real estate agent accused him of being inexperienced and pushed him to approve the higher value.

“It’s a tough situation,” Sexton said. “You have two brokers pressuring you and sending you signed documents saying the sale price is valid.”

Sexton said after he told Fay he would need to further substantiate the higher asking price, Fay stopped responding.

The property never sold and is now off the market. Sexton never heard from Fay again.

“It’s infuriating to me, because he’s putting my license in jeopardy,” Sexton said. “This is my livelihood.”

In a text message, Fay denied “any claim that I have ever manipulated or influenced an appraisal in any fashion.” He did not respond to questions about the sale.

Lien said he could not comment on the failed deal.

“I was instructed by my brokerage that any press would have to go through our office, and we’re not allowed to speak on it,” said Lien, who works out of eXp’s King of Prussia office.

The manager of that eXP office did not return a request for comment.

‘Really bad stuff’

Daniel Perlman, a former prosecutor in the Maryland State’s Attorney’s Office who now practices white-collar criminal defense, said anyone who signed documents they knew to be false could potentially face legal problems.

“If there are documents that have incorrect information for a mortgage, then yeah, somebody has criminal liability,” Perlman said. “You’re under penalty of perjury for signing these documents.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said the office does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations, as did a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania State Real Estate Commission, which licenses agents.

Nick Pizzola, vice president of the Temple Area Property Association, which represents local landlords, said the COVID-19 pandemic has had a lasting negative impact on the off-campus real estate market, leaving landlords struggling to sign leases and pay their own mortgages.

Still, he said, the seller’s agents had to have known something was amiss when a buyer was offering double the asking price.

“Anyone who knows anything about real estate would have run away from those deals,” Pizzola said. “Some really bad stuff was happening.”

Most participants in Fay’s deals were reluctant to discuss their roles when contacted by The Inquirer this month. Some seller’s agents said their brokerages had instructed them to remain silent. Others claimed ignorance when it came to the details of the deals they had helped arrange.

In the March 2025 sale of an apartment building on the 2200 block of North Sydenham Street, for example, both the seller and his agent said they could not explain why the sales price did not match the amount listed on the deed.

The property initially went up for sale for $324,900 in December 2024 but was then re-listed and sold to Fay’s client in March 2025 for $789,000. The seller, Alvjod Dedaj, said he did not actually receive that higher amount. He referred further questions to his real estate agent at Long & Foster.

“I have no clue what’s going on,” Dedaj said. “I just cashed out a certain amount of money.”

Dedaj’s agent, Bob Kiziroglou, who works out of Long & Foster’s Devon office, said he, too, could not recall why the asking price suddenly jumped. He referred questions to Fay.

“Reach out to him, man, he’ll give you all the details,” Kiziroglou said.

A message left at Long & Foster’s Devon office was not returned.

The Broad Street office of Keller Williams Realty was another hub for deals involving Fay, with five of its agents representing sellers in eight sales. An office manager did not respond to requests for comment.

Wisenberg, who was a prosecutor in the Whitewater/Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan investigation, said he found it particularly suspicious that Fay arranged deals with mortgages that far exceeded the initial asking price, and with sellers receiving less than the stated purchase price.

“What’s he doing with the rest of the money?” Wisenberg asked.

Trouble brewing

Already, there are signs of trouble in the neighborhood around Temple.

In November, one lender, Easy Street Capital, filed to foreclose on a Park Avenue property that sold in late 2024 for $850,000 — more than double its value just two years prior.

While no buyer’s agent is listed in MLS data for the sale, Lien, the eXp agent, is listed as representing the seller. The buyer, Park Ave Enterprise LLC, is registered to an associate of Fay’s who participated in at least four other sales around Temple that he brokered.

According to court filings, the LLC defaulted on an $807,000 mortgage about four months after purchase.

The lenders that financed Fay’s purchases now bear the most risk of the overvalued and under-occupied rentals lapsing into foreclosure. A private lenders association in November warned its members of a “fraud scheme” operating around Temple University, and cities like Baltimore have seen hundreds of properties fall into foreclosure as a result of suspected mortgage fraud rings.

A spokesperson for City Councilmember Jeffery “Jay” Young, whose district encompasses the affected properties, said he was “not familiar with the situation.” He called mortgage fraud “a common and unscrupulous real estate practice that happens too often in our city.”

Orbanek, the Temple spokesperson, said the university is working to identify students who may be impacted by potential foreclosures and asked them to contact the university’s Essential Needs Hub, which connects student renters with supportive resources.

Joelle DelPrete, a former Temple grad student who works for the university, lives in an apartment unit that Fay helped purchase. He brokered a sale of the rental property to “18th Estates LLC” in December 2024 for $868,000. It had previously been listed for $385,000.

A few months later, DelPrete said, Fay texted her that he was the property manager, and he wanted her to sign a new lease so he could begin collecting rent.

“We assumed it was a totally legit company,” DelPrete said.

Soon, DelPrete said, unpaid water and trash collection bills started piling up, and maintenance issues went unanswered. In October, she found a document known as an Act 91 notice that was posted on an adjacent property in advance of foreclosure proceedings. It showed the owners — who had been represented in the purchase by Fay — had stopped paying its mortgage and owed roughly $25,000.

DelPrete and her three roommates are hoping to move out before her building goes into foreclosure.

“Especially living around Temple, you just gotta be careful and make sure everything is aboveboard,” she said. “If something feels off, it is off.”