Exclusive | How a leaky toilet spiraled into a NYC apartment left in ruins and a 9-year lawsuit seeking $750K in damages

It all started on a soggy Sunday afternoon in June 2017 — and has since grown into a rather crappy ordeal.Gary Paul was sitting on the toilet in his Upper West Side studio co-op apartment reading the paper when he claims he noticed brown dirt oozing down his bathroom mirrors.Looking up, he said he saw the crown molding splitting.

Then came the sound: water rushing inside the walls, running down the pipes.Allegedly stemming from a leaky toilet in the unit above, he claims it quickly spread to his first-floor kitchen, flooded the hallway outside with an inch of water, and eventually seeped into the basement. And it’s all far from flushed away.What followed was a messy, fingers-pointed-every-way legal battle at 108 W.

87th St.It’s nine years later and the fight is still ongoing.“The co-op let the water run for over 18 hours after being notified, as it was a Sunday afternoon, and they thought they’d get to it the next day, with a certain amount of careless lack of duty,” Paul claimed to The Post.

“Thousands of gallons poured over my apartment from when it was discovered until mid-day the next day when management arrived, with keys, and a few hours later when a plumber arrived to arrest the flow of water.” Frustrated, Paul — a design consultant with a Harvard graduate degree — stopped paying his then-$581-a-month maintenance fee and filed a $650,000 lawsuit (later upped to $750,000 upon amending the complaint) in damages alone against the co-op, the building management, the maintenance company (which was subsequently dismissed) and his upstairs neighbors, “because they didn’t give me the money for the insurance and they weren’t remediating the mold,” he claimed.Ever since, Paul — who no longer owns the apartment — has bounced from rental to rental.“The case is worth over a million dollars at this point because of the legal fees and diminished fair rental value and [there’s] property damage because there’s a lot of personal prope...