To her loyalists, Scott is a community pillar, devoted to the city’s most vulnerable — homeless families, alcoholics, addicts and victims of domestic violence. “She feeds people. She sees to it that seniors get food delivered to their door,” said Leona Martin, 43, a leasing consultant and Park Southern resident. 

Her detractors say the pastor is self-serving and incompetent, turning Park Southern into her personal fiefdom, living rent-free as she drove it on a downward spiral of dysfunction. For a time, they say, Scott took control of a third-floor social room, turning it into a church in which she held services. 

“She’s rude, she’s disrespectful and she doesn’t care about anyone but herself,” said Roberta Henderson, a tenant who is a custodian at the U.S. Capitol. “She feeds off weak people.” 

Scott, in an interview, was a gush of defiance as she swatted away any suggestion that she’s a malevolent force. 

“Poor, black and misunderstood is what I am,” she said, sitting in Park Southern’s lobby and greeting supporters as they came and went. On her finger, she wore a diamond-encrusted ring in the shape of a cross, which she said commemorated her ordination as a pastor.