A husband and wife ended up with countless unexpected roommates after moving into a cockroach-infested Toronto apartment, and now they're engaged in a battle with the landlord that refused to nullify their nightmare lease.

Dr. Rochelle Johnstone, an infectious disease doctor who recently began a residency at a downtown hospital, rented an apartment with her husband, Mark, at 40 Gerrard Street East on short notice in July.

Upon moving in, the couple found the apartment — to their horror — crawling with cockroaches. After a sleepless night of futile attempts to kill the masses of vermin, Johnstone concluded that the unit was not habitable, packed up, and found another, less disgusting rental to call home.

"I admit, I was a bit of an innocent," Johnstone tells blogTO.

"I did not think that I had to worry about moving into somewhere actively infested. The landlord had said that they were spraying, and I thought that meant that they were very proactive and would keep the place clean."

She says that when she "realized that the place was simply crawling with cockroaches, I thought it was obvious that no one could be expected to live like that — they were crawling up onto my bed!"

"I started packing up at 4:00 a.m., and was out of that building entirely by mid-day."

But when the couple told their landlord, a shell corporation run by Maple Leaf Property Management, that they wanted to nullify the lease, the landlord insisted the couple continue to make rent payments.

Johnstone explains that she assumed "they would see reason and let me out of the lease and clean the place up."

Instead, she alleges that the landlord "chose to gaslight me, saying that they had seen no sign of any infestation."

"I'm also totally horrified that they keep saying that spraying is enough and there's no active infestation when I obviously have seen more than a lifetime's worth of cockroaches there."

Couple trapped in lease after moving into roach-infested nightmare rental in Toronto - 🎥 Rochelle Johnstone #Toronto pic.twitter.com/E8B1CtIvZ6

— blogTO (@blogTO) August 16, 2023

Johnstone says that even after pest control treatments, "it seemed to not get better, just ongoing cockroaches everywhere."

The couple is currently fighting their case to nullify the lease at the Landlord and Tenant Board as the landlord stands firm on its claims that the infestation has been eliminated despite photo and video evidence showing the contrary.

Johnstone says that the only options provided by the landlord were to either pay the rent or assign the lease to someone else.

Marc Goldgrub, a lawyer at Green Economy Law Professional Corporation who is representing the couple in their landlord dispute, tells blogTO that "Management had explicitly told them the unit was sprayed for pests before they moved in, and has denied the infestation ever since."

"Accordingly, Rochelle and her husband had no faith in management's ability to rectify the situation."

Though the couple has gone on to find new accommodations as they appeal to the Landlord Tenant Board, Johnstone worries about building residents without the means to fight their cases or just pack up and leave.

"I know that a lot of the people in that building are students, because TMU is right across the street, but I could not stand the idea of bringing some poor student into this situation," she says.

"How could you possibly study if cockroaches are crawling all over your space from the very moment of move-in?"

"I am just beside myself that someone not in my fortunate situation, someone for whom first and last month's rent was hard to come up with — and that's a lot of students — would have been stuck living in this crawling, unhygienic, frankly disgusting situation, let alone that they think that my response to this should be to trap someone else in this situation rather than fight it."

blogTO reached out via email to the leasing agents for 40 Gerrard seeking comment on the infestation and tenant dispute, however, there has been no response as of writing.