plaintiff: teontae from des moines, iowa. BLACK MIDWESTERN REPRESENTATION IN THE HOUSE. you know how i feel about my fellow heartland blacks! nothing warms the ice-encrusted cockles of my heart more than seeing another black person who lives near a grain silo!! teontae is wearing an oversized dress shirt with black pants and has a neat little mustache and beard. with him in court today is his white girlfriend jessica, who has the same t-boz haircut my sister had in 1992, which definitively tells you everything you need to know about her!
defendant: latosha from des moines, iowa. okay, i know what you’re thinking: latosha is brown-skinned and sassy, sporting neon orange girbaud jeans and crunchy fingerwaves because we midwesterners are always several decades behind the coasts when it comes to fashions and hairstyles. and listen, i don’t blame you; i was expecting that, too! what i was absolutely not expecting was for “latosha” to be a stout, pale, long-haired milkmaid in a magenta chico’s tunic. EXCUSE ME??????? white farmers in iowa are really out here naming their children latosha??? i love this more than i’ve ever loved anything in my entire miserable life!
the complaint: teontae is suing his ex-girlfriend for a stolen car and harassment. he has also petitioned the court for a paternity test, which is my least favorite variety of courtroom drama but okay, fine, whatever!
what does he want: $4500 (what kind of car did she steal, a fucking 87 tercel?????) countersuit, to keep things spicy: latosha would like 4500 retaliatory dollars for emotional distress, OH BOY.
how it went down: teontae says he started dating tosha in april 2017 and she moved in shortly thereafter (four months after they met, according to tosha). teontae says they were both married at the time (oh no!) and that tosha would watch his children when he went to work. okay now, the story that teontae tells next is so scattered and convoluted that at one point greg has to get out a pen and paper and a calculator to try to figure out what’s happening??? just literal minutes of gobbledygook????? i listened to it four times (you’re welcome) and it basically boils down to this: tosha was pregnant with a child teontae believed to be his, then her husband (remember how she has one of those???) called teontae at work and told him it’s actually his.
tosha says when she met teontae he was perfect, but within a few months she found out he was a liar. they moved into a house together in august 2017 (four months after they met), and tosha says she already was pregnant with their child at that time. she left her husband in february 2017, but they hadn’t shared a marital bed since 2016 (are you keeping up with this) so it’s impossible that the child she was carrying at that time was his. tosha says she never told teontae that he wasn’t the father of her son, and neither did her husband. I AM EXHAUSTED BY THIS.
teontae’s current girlfriend, jessica, interjects and says, “she is a habitual liar!” teontae hands the judge several sheets of highlighted printed out facebook evidence™, some of which reads as follows: “it ain’t teontae’s baby, point blank period. dna just proved my husband as his daddy.” GIRL, WHAT. you can’t be posting shit like that if it isn’t true and there’s a chance you could end up in child support court! come on!!! (also, tosha mentions getting out of jail in one of the posts and jessica says she went to jail for shooting teontae’s house up. excuse me? iowa is really getting down like that?? what are they putting in that motherfucking corn?????????)
teontae says that once he and latosha started really getting into it and fighting all the time he decided that it would be better for him to move out. one day he left the property (for unspecified reasons, maybe to get moving boxes? or a bullet-proof vest??) and came back to find the window screens had been pried off and his el camino was missing. he called the police to report it, and in the meantime tosha was messaging him, talking about “i got your car,” etc etc. okay, listen to me. i am not advocating that you steal things or commit crimes, but one critical lesson we all need to learn, if you retain no other scrap of information from these thousands of words that i vomit at you every single day, is that you gotta stop putting potentially suspicious shit you do in writing. if you’re going to break into someone’s trailer, lmaoo you need to keep that information to yourself! was she, i don’t know, daring him to litigate? teontae is handing doyle printed out text sheets™ in which tosha is telling him that she stole his fucking car and i’m over here like WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF SMOOTH-BRAINED SHIT IS THIS???
jessica says their harassment claim stems from an incident in which latosha 1 posted her address on facebook, 2 sent people to her house to chase her with guns before shooting up her house with her children inside, and 3 bragged about it on facebook afterward. i’m fucking speechless. i can overshare with the best of them, but this? this is lunacy! tosha tries to refute the claim but teontae says that not only was she picked up and charged with the crime but she also pleaded guilty in court??? what the hell is happening here!
jessica has reams of paper in her accordion of truth™, binder clipped and color-coded sheets and sheets and sheets of evidence against latosha, including an order of protection they have on her right now. why on earth did she even agree to come to court? greg is livid, just thoroughly outraged, and he tells teontae to call child protective services and, if the child proves to be his, to take her to family court to get custody. i’ve never seen him this mad before, and that’s saying something!
the ruling: the judge asks tosha about her counterclaim and she barely finishes pulling a thick stack of photocopies out of her accordion before he cuts her off like, “evidence of cheating? who cares!” you can’t fucking shoot at people and get emotional distress money, so her case is dismissed. the plaintiff’s is granted, the baby is indeed his, and godspeed to everyone involved. OOF.
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “you’ve proven enough! she’s been convicted of shooting you up, you’ve done enough!”