who was on judge mathis yesterday? #214
an idiotic recap of the greatest syndicated courtroom show of all time
plantiff: dontea from long beach, california. dontea is reasonably handsome, your standard bald-head-sculpted-beard-huge-watch kind of fella, but he is sexily biting his lower lip as he walks into the courtroom and that lets me know everything i need to about this dude: he’s a life ruiner!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
defendant: melba from los angeles, california. wow you don’t hear of a lot of women named melba nowadays. what a great name! if i was gonna have a kid i’d put “melba” on the potential name list for sure. melba, patrice, gertrude, blanche. i wouldn’t want to pick anything too hipster and twee but i do want people to know that my imaginary child has an old-ass mom. picture me limping down the bread aisle at meijer hollering “BRENDA! GET YOUR BLACK ASS BACK OVER HERE, NOW!!!” wait, should i have (read: purchase) a baby? this sounds fun!
the complaint: dontea started dating melba after meeting her online but, after they got engaged, she constantly accused him of cheating and now he’s suing his ex-fiancée for unreturned property.
what does he want: $5000 HOT DAMN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! melba is countersuing and wants $5000 in return for rent and car rental fees.
how it went down: dontea says that he met melba online and six months later they were engaged, which is wild because i had no idea they were lesbians! he says that shortly after they moved in together he had to leave his job due to health issues and bills started to pile up and he and melba quickly devolved from getting along great to fighting all the damn time and they split up shortly thereafter.
melba says she thought she met the man of her dreams because when they met dontea told her he was about to come into a lot of money and was going to buy a big, beautiful house for them to live in. (uh oh!) dontea took melba and her daughter to see this “huge, multimillion-dollar home” and apparently showed her paperwork that proved he was in the process of purchasing it. umm, this is making all the bells in my head clang like notre fucking dame. when we tried to buy a cheap-ass, rural-ass, “you bitches need to build a new septic system-ass” house deep in the scrotum of assfuck, michigan it was like…………..so much paperwork and phone calls and we had to submit to a full financial colonoscopy (please, if you will, imagine me trying to describe to chad the banker what i do for a “job”) that at one point i was just like I QUIT, BYE, but that was after many many months of zillow listings and standing in other people’s barren living rooms trying to figure out in which corner i would put a la-z-boy. am i to believe that dontea did all that, suffered through all the headaches of loan approval and walkthroughs and inspections, in the time between when they met and six months later when he surprised melba with the deed??? i’m sorry but i can’t!
melba says that dontea made lots of promises of future trips and exciting plans based on a supposed settlement he was about to get, but two weeks before their wedding everything fell apart. greg is like HOLD ON BACK UP THE TRUCK and so am i because did they move into the fancy house or what? according to melba they got engaged a month after meeting (HOLY SHIT) and the only reason she gives for why is that dontea made her feel “really special.” ugh god i absolutely understand this and it makes me so mad i could scream. imagine agreeing to marry someone you met five minutes ago who you don’t actually know because they made you feel “special.” first of all, what the fuck does that mean. second, if people in general made each other feel accepted and appreciated and admired more often we wouldn’t be out her with basement-dwelling self-esteem signing our lives away to the first person who said “i like you.” i hate this a whole fucking lot!
greg starts scolding melba, telling her that you gotta give someone at least a year before you get yourself legally bound to their problems, and melba nods, but not in a way that is convincing (to me) that she is absorbing this advice and planning to implement it in her actual life. melba says that two weeks before their wedding she went onto their online registry (how did she even have time to make a registry? how do you decide what pots and sheets you want that quickly???) and nine women had commented that dontea was a scam artist and she shouldn’t marry him. LOL WHAT. okay this is fucking delicious but how on earth did nine women scorned find their wedding registry?? did he post it on facebook????? spam them with the link???????? i absolutely need someone to forward me that email!
dontea assured melba that those women were “bitter” (don’t get me started) and that he loved her and couldn’t wait to be her husband, but then his settlement didn’t come through and they immediately called off the wedding. WAIT, WHAT. what about love and specialness??????? apparently melba had put down all the deposits for their wedding with the idea that dontea would pay the difference when his settlement came through, and when it didn’t she called off the wedding. or maybe he did? it’s hard to discern. wait i’m sorry, she is a terrible storyteller, apparently they called off the wedding two days beforehand? but, like, how do you get that far without anyone having been paid???? i’m getting mad because i prefer a linear narrative and guess what: SO DOES GREG. clearly losing patience, he asks melba what happened after……………..whatever it was she was just talking about, and she says that two months after the canceled wedding she was going through dontea’s phone and found messages between him and another woman that he was going to marry her. literally what the FUCK.
melba says dontea’s excuse was that he was just sweet talking that other lady so she wouldn’t take him to child support court, but homie if she’s mad now how do you think shit’s gonna go down after you jilt her at an imaginary altar??? greg doesn’t give a shit about all that, he asks melba what ever happened with the house, and she said it had already been paid for using a previous settlement (omg) and for the wedding expenses they were waiting for a different settlement. is this a viable business strategy? if so, i need to find a slippery-floored supermarket posthaste.
dontea says that melba’s story is true but “not like that.” dontea got into an accident and received a $4 million settlement (SOMEONE HIT ME WITH A CITY BUS, PLEASE) but he didn’t get the money right away so he took out a loan against the settlement and used that money to pay for the house, and he was going to use the balance to pay for the wedding once his check arrived and he paid off the loan. the house cost $660k and he doesn’t say exactly how much he borrowed but whatever was left dontea spent on “fixing the house and bills.” the judge isn’t buying this and asks why dontea couldn’t just wait until he got the check in his hands before he started spending. dontea again claims that “bills” are the reason and greg is about to move on but he stops himself short and says “what kind of bills?” dontea then launches into a long story about paying for his dying mother’s care and greg cuts him off and says, “don’t try to play the dead mother card to get out of sounding like a con man!!!!!!!!!”
i gotta admit that i am not 100% sure what is going on here, or what the con is, because idk shit about settlements and also melba’s relaying of the events that led us here was so confusing that i understand that this dude was likely cheating, or at least stringing multiple women along, but i don’t really understand the financial con he had going? i mean, maybe if the company he won the money from was in court today i’d get it but they’re not so i don’t. dontea says something flip under his breath and then greg loses it, and maybe greg saw something in the paperwork he reads before the show??? or maybe he’s just mad because he’s a FEMINIST and this dude has fucked over at least nine “bitter” women plus one who isn’t very organized when it comes to laying out a case!!!!!!!!!!! ally of the year!
the ruling: okay here we fucking go. melba tries to talk again and (thankfully) greg is like “JUST GIVE ME YOUR EVIDENCE” and when she does he reads one of the comments on their registry aloud, which i am going to court report for your reading pleasure: “dontea is a mental case. he sets out to destroy women financially and use you for whatever he can get from you. he lies and tells you he’s coming into a very large amount of money then proposes to you, then he claims they’re holding his money up so the woman can start financing things and putting things in her name. i’m sure he also told you he’s very ill with cancer. i feel very sorry for you and can’t believe he got a woman to fall for it and marry his [they bleeped it out]. you need to look into his past. you should be more careful when meeting someone over a dating site.” oh my god!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
greg reads more of the testimonials, including one from a woman who said he lied and told her he’d been in the navy when he’d actually been in prison, and another from a woman who said she was engaged to him when a woman called her and said he was engaged to her, too. yet another woman said she had a box full of evidence that dontea is broke and begged melba to call her so she could show it to her. there’s also some printed out facebook posts™ in which women have posted his picture along with warnings about his behavior. i’m gobsmacked! no one is this cute or smart or talented, not enough to be putting up with this pathological shit, and also what the fuck is it about getting engaged????? do people really want to be married this badly?????? DO THEY NOT REALIZE HOW LITTLE PRIVACY AND UNENCUMBERED TIME IS INVOLVED???????????
there are so many of these, uhh, terrible performance reviews and greg keeps on reading them aloud while the crowd boos and jeers and dontea shakes his head while laughing. i would crumble to the floor and pass away if every person i’d ever boned was unionizing against me, but i guess he and i are different in that way! at this point greg is straight up shouting at dude, before finally saying “i’m not gonna waste my time on this soft con you got, you’re the worst kinda con i know” and tossing all the evidence papers in the air. then he screams “IF YOU GONE PIMP, PIMP! ALL THIS SOFT CON BEGGING AIN’T NOTHING!” and then he dismisses his case before granting melba’s due to “perjury” (okay…?) and storming out of the courtroom and leaving me stunned and humming “call jg wentworth, 877-CASH-NOW!!!!” under my breath.
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “sir, you sound like a con man trying to run game. you know game recognize game, and you don’t look familiar.”
*bangs gavel*