Legal Question in Landlord & Tenant Law in New York

This may be a rather unique question since everyone I've talked to today has never heard of this happening, but I'm hoping someone can provide some perspective.

Some backstory first. We are tenants in Manhattan, NY. In November, we had no heat in our apartment from Nov 7th - Nov 30th, no water pressure in our shower from the Nov 1st - Nov 30th, no gas for our stove from Nov 7th - Nov 30th, and no hot water from Nov 7th - Nov 14th. We attempted to negotiate with our landlord company for a fair rent during this month and were unable to come to an agreement. At the end of these proceedings they informed us that we could move out at the end of December or they would begin eviction proceedings. We chose to stay in our apartment since we felt we could get an abatement for violation of the warranty of habitability, and would rather pay what a judge decides is our legal responsibility and not our landlord's offer.

We received our notice of rent owed by Dec 21st, and it was properly served to us. A roommate not on the lease received a Notice of Petition on January 19th and did not sign for it, so we went to answer that we hadn't been served properly along with other issues. We appeared in housing court today, January 24th, to answer the petition, and were told that the index number on the petition did not reference our case. Every attempt was made to find both me and the other tenant on the lease and we were not in the system. The lawyers representing our landlord were called, confirmed the index number, and could not prove they had filed a suit against us. We were given a copy of the petition that is filed under our index number and it is not against us or even in our borough. We were told there was no suit against us and that our landlords would have to send us another notice of petition if they wanted to begin eviction proceedings.

Here are my concerns, should we have gotten any other documentation from the housing court to confirm that we are not being sued or is the fact that the index number on our notice of petition matches the number of a petition obviously not against us sufficient?

Second, we have a very strong case against our landlord and really wanted to clear up this issue by appearing in court. If for some reason our landlord decides to draw this out, I assume we will need to retain a lawyer in order to take them to court to determine the rent owed. Are we solely responsible for fees related to hiring a lawyer or can we include them in the suit?

Finally, the fact that we received (for lack of a better word) fake legal documents makes me concerned about how we can trust this landlord to go through any of the proper channels to evict us. Is it possible that this would constitute harassment or would they have to try to evict us without cause first?

Thank you.

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