the plaintiff: lawanda from houston, texas. you know i love a club dress in the courtroom, and lawanda’s skintight black mini version DOES NOT DISAPPOINT.
the defendant: katy from houston, texas. lawanda’s daughter (UH fucking OH), sharply dressed in a dark blue button down and royal blue pants, and she looks mad as hell. she also has a faded neck tattoo, which might be scary if i didn’t also have one. i am a sentient marshmallow who most certainly cannot fight but absolutely is horrible at longterm decision-making.
the complaint: katy started getting into trouble in the sixth grade and went to jail for witness tampering. EXCUSE ME, PLEASE. my hat? it’s fucking off! think about how fucking tough you thought your scrawny ass was at 12 years old and multiply that by AN EXTREMELY SOPHISTICATED CRIME. i couldn’t even spell “witness tampering” at that age, let alone successfully accomplish it. this is a bad bitch! i got caught shoplifting lipsticks my freshman year of high school and basically melted into a puddle of snot when the cops came. i literally cannot imagine being half as cool as katy is, FUCK.
what does she want: $1950 for apartment damages.
how it went down: okay so katy was a naughty girl growing up and consistently got in trouble in school. so much trouble that her mom was forced to pull her out of her regular high school and put her into a special school where she could work a job while also finishing high school at her own pace. why is this not standard practice, especially if you’re the kind of person whose parents don’t have half a million dollars just lying around to put you through college? i have said before and will die saying that if i could have learned to be a plumber instead of taking macroeconomics or whatever my life would have had a completely different trajectory, i.e. i would currently be a rich and successful plumber rather than a freelance moron crying on the internet.
katy graduated on a friday, and the following monday the sheriff called her mom to say she was going to be arrested. katy had testified in court on her friend’s behalf, and when he was found guilty katy and some other friends went to the victim’s house to intimidate her. first of all, they gotta word these intros better. i thought she did this as a little kid! second, if the judge already found you guilty whipping my ass after the fact isn’t going to make him find you less guilty? what is the logic here!! katy picked up two felony cases thanks to that little escapade.
lawanda bailed katy out of jail and she was doing good so lawanda, a nicer person than all of us combined, rented her daughter an apartment upon her release from the penitentiary. do you know how goddamned hard it is to get your black parents to get you a lease in their name? and after the kid got out of prison??? anyway, lawanda is a fucking saint. katy didn’t pay the fines related to her felony conviction (i think? we’re only four minutes in and there’s a lot to process here!!) so she went back to jail for another eight months.
katy says that she acted out when she was younger because her mother wanted to raise her on “the straight and narrow,” and greg loses his fucking shit. ooh, he hates a bad kid. nothing brings the bloviating, pontificating, fire-and-brimstoning out of our man like a disrespectful child tormenting their long-suffering mother. HE IS DOWNRIGHT DISGUSTED. “i ended up jail because i didn’t have a fun mom?” is not gonna play in this courtroom. katy says that while she was incarcerated she had a lot of time to think about her life (i bet) and has come to appreciate her mother’s sacrifice, which sounds like a thing the state forced her to memorize on her last day of jail.
a few months into her living there, lawanda went to visit katy at the apartment she’d gotten for her and upon her arrival she saw an eviction notice on the door. she went inside and the apartment was completely trashed. she says it smelled and looked horrible, there were holes in the walls and doors, plus there were gnats and vomit and dog poop everywhere. i can’t even talk about this because i start thinking about how stressful living next door to a person like that must have been to her neighbors and it makes me want to scratch my skin off. imagine poop-vomit crawling with gnats on the other side of a wall you pay to share with a stranger. i’m weeping! lawanda went to confront katy at work and katy’s excuse was that she got “caught up.” then katy went into hiding and dodged her mother for three weeks, so lawanda spent $1900 hiring people to come into the apartment to clean and fix everything she’d broken.
the ruling: listen, the pictures of the apartment damage are disgusting. as lawanda says, “just nasty.” greg is clearly revolted; i’m gagging, too, and not in the hot way. the judge asks katy for a defense, one that doyle and the in-studio audience and the viewers at home already know he is not going to listen to considering the disdain with which he is now addressing miss katy, and she mumbles something about not knowing how much it cost until her mother had already paid to get it fixed and her mom couldn’t reach her because her phone got stolen and blah blah blah i’m sorry babe but you let your dog shit on the floor you lose!
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “i don’t know who she thinks she’s playing with, she sounds like she needs to go back to jail.” i mean, harsh but fair!
*bangs gavel*