Is there a law that protects a tenant from eviction?

i'm currently 9 months pregnant, and i live with my hubby and 4yr old son, we recently moved into an apartment that needed some fixing up-but the landlord said he would fix the things that needed to be fixed- he collected our rent and disappeared! nvr fixed anything and now his wife came from peru and is trying to charge us more rent and doesn't validate her husband's promises to fix anything in our apartment- now since my husband has paid the rent before and nothing got fixed he's holding on to the rent and won't pay it for all the obvious reasons... she actually took us to court to have us evicted- but the judge didn't hear our side of the story and just told us to pay the rent without even hearing our side of why we haven't paid the rent- especially since she was not the person we did business with in the first place! can anyone give us some legal advice as how to take her to court for negligence of landlord duties. thanks for ur time in reading this, please help.