A D.C. woman has reached a settlement in a lawsuit against the District of Columbia Housing Authority for cutting off her housing benefits after she left her allegedly abusive husband.

The settlement granted the woman her housing benefits back and also changed processes at DCHA for other survivors of domestic abuse. DCist is not naming the woman because she is an alleged victim of domestic violence.

“I’m glad the situation got resolved, I just don’t want nobody else to go through what I went through,” she tells DCist about the settlement. “That’s why I don’t mind sharing my story, even though it’s complicated for me and I don’t want to get into it because I get emotional thinking about it.”

The woman was married to her ex-husband for about 20 years, and the two of them have three children together, according to the original complaint against DCHA. She says that he was abusive toward her and that in September 2018, he threatened her life in the presence of their two younger children, the suit said. After that incident, she called the police, filed a police report, and obtained a civil protection order against him, which meant he had to move out of the home they shared.

His departure from the home created a series of bureaucratic complications with her housing benefits through DCHA, eventually leading her to fall behind on rent and leaving her and her two younger children at risk of homelessness, per the suit.

“It got to the point where I just couldn’t take on the responsibility of paying rent,” she says. “I was threatened to be thrown out of my apartment.”

The lawsuit alleged that DCHA was violating both its own policies and the Violence Against Women Act by failing to grant existing housing benefits to the victim of abuse in the case of a breakup due to domestic violence.

Here’s the whole series of events, as laid out by the lawsuit: Since 2017, the woman and her husband had been paying rent with the help of a housing voucher from DCHA. The plaintiff’s husband went to the agency and got himself designated the “head of household” for the voucher, allegedly without her knowledge. That designation is important because heads of household are the only people able to request a hearing for review of the family’s benefits.

When the woman’s ex-husband moved out of the home, she was worried he would try to take their benefits. She wanted to call a hearing to ensure she would be the one to receive their voucher (as mandated by VAWA and the D.C. Code), and she also wanted DCHA to recalculate the voucher amount to account for her ex-husband’s missing income.

DCHA eventually rejected her request for a hearing. “[Y]our request for an informal hearing—[is denied because] … it has been determined according to our records that your client is not the head-of-household and therefore, not entitled to an administrative review,” DCHA wrote in a letter to the plaintiff and her lawyers at the Legal Aid Society, per the suit. “While I am sympathetic to your client’s circumstances, the administrative grievance process does not entitle individual members of a household composition to request a hearing except, the head of household.”

The agency also allegedly eventually stopped making rent payments to the woman’s landlord altogether. The agency did not respond to a request for comment from DCist.

The decision led the plaintiff to file her lawsuit. In a matter of weeks after the lawsuit was filed, DCHA began distributing the voucher benefits to the plaintiff again, recalculated for the household’s new, lower income, says Legal Aid lawyer Heather Latino.

But as a part of the settlement reached this week, DCHA has also agreed to create a new email address — hcvp.vawa@dchousing.org — which advocates and benefits recipients can contact to try to resolve issues relating to the Violence Against Women Act.

“We’re really happy with the resolution of this litigation, because not only has our client’s specific situation been addressed and resolved, but through this settlement we’re hopeful that other victims of domestic violence won’t have to go through this,” Latino says.

Separately from the lawsuit, DCHA has proposed new processes to expedite the determination of whether one of its beneficiaries qualifies for protection under VAWA.

“I can’t forget all that I went through, but I’m trying,” the plaintiff tells DCist. “I feel that the email is good, and maybe if somebody uses it if they get in this type of situation, [DCHA] will do their part in responding as they try to resolve whatever situation it may be.”