plaintiff: gabriel from chattanooga, tennessee. gabriel is wearing a magenta carding buttoned over a magenta and white striped shirt and honestly? i need to wear more matching clothes. i mean, this isn’t a serious concern since i just fucking wear sweatshirts all the time but every time i see someone in some matchy-matchy shit i think “wow, they really look put together!” you know how intentional you have to be with caring for your clothing when it matches? if it gets jacked up in the wash then it’s always gonna look slightly off to me and that is the kind of thing that will slowly drive me mad, which is why as much as i admire and appreciate that kind of care and deliberateness i could never attempt it myself. anyway, shout out to her.
defendant: randy from cattanooga, tennessee. okay maybe this is just a chattanooga thing because randy strides into the courtroom wearing a beautiful royal blue suit with a matching blue shirt, his long hair in immaculate braids and pulled back into a half-ponytail situation, his beard full but neatly kept. what a fucking fox.
the complaint: gabriel lent her cousin her car and he drove it into a ditch, totaling it.
what does she want: $3500 countersuit ugh god: randy would like a retaliatory $3500 because gabriel lied to his wife and told her he cheated on her, wow wow!
how it went down: gabriel says randy is her cousin but they grew up like siblings. his mom died from cancer when he was 13 and gabriel’s mom took randy in. gabriel says that they had no idea she’d even been sick so when his mother died it came as a complete shock to them. greg starts talking about losing his own mother and says that when a parent dies when a child is young that the kid typically either uses that death as inspiration or the grief causes them to self-destruct and this might be too much trauma processing from my favorite escapist television program??? let’s get back to the mess!
gabriel says she bought a car and let randy borrow it, and randy told her he hit a pothole and ran off the road. but gabriel says a pothole doesn’t “smash the whole front of your car in,” and hot damn what did he do? okay so he says he hit a pothole and then ran into a ditch, but gabriel is still dubious because she says he smashed up “the front, the back, the sides, the whole car” and starts pulling photos out of her accordion of truth™ to show greg the extent of the damage. ooh wee, the entire car is fucked up!
randy says he hit a pothole, lost control of the car, then he hit the guardrail. holy fucking shit, that’s terrifying. greg asks randy what happened to the rear end of the car (gabriel’s pictures show extensive damage to the back) and randy says “i don’t know.” okay i don’t wanna start no shit but what do you mean you don’t know? did you black out??? were you with someone who damaged the car and you don’t wanna say????? this makes me think of that richard gere movie arbitrage, in which he was a sexy bank guy (don’t even think about asking me to explain his job!) who was cheating on susan sarandon and got into a car accident with his mistress and tried to cover it up. omg, is that what happened here??? I LOVE EROTIC THRILLERS.
randy doesn’t have an explanation for the damages and greg says “perhaps if you had a good explanation, you would have a good defense!” hahaha that’s cold. randy also agreed to pay gabriel for the damages, and she has the printed out text messages™ to prove it. randy says he intended to pay and gave gabriel $200 toward the car, but then greg cuts him off to give us a lesson in negligent driving. he says that if you lose control of the car, even if it’s because you hit a pothole, you are negligent and therefore responsible because it’s your duty to see things like ice and potholes on the road and drive accordingly. is that real? i mean, it sounds legit, but did greg just mainline the rules of the road in his chambers?? how does he know????
greg doesn’t believe that randy hit a pothole and neither does gabriel so that’s that on that. he asks randy why he refused to honor the agreement he made with his sister to pay for her car and he says because she called his wife and told her he was cheating on her? “did you do that?” greg asks gabriel, grinning like the cat that caught the canary. gabriel says she most certainly did not, and that she doesn’t even get along with his wife which is why she’s lying on her. sounds pretty convenient to me. “oh you made up a story about me so i’m not paying” is a whole lot easier than paying for a car you played parkour with or whatever he was out there doing!
the ruling: greg says that “gossip” isn’t a legal excuse for not paying a debt, plus he thinks randy is lying anyway so it doesn’t really matter what he fucking says. greg asks him how gabriel owes him $3500 for emotional distress and idk if greg is cranky or hungry but when randy takes too long to come up with an answer the judge blows up on him and is like “no wonder you can’t get away with your lies!” greg gives him one more chance to explain and randy fumbles again (and laughs!) and greg shouts, “case dismissed!” gabriel’s is granted, of course, and i guess we’ll have to wait for the lifetime movie to find out who was in the car and how the back of it got caved in.
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “you didn’t ask her the specifics of who you might have been sleeping with? you just wanted to hurry up and get outta there??? that’s what we call ‘consciousness of guilt!’”
*bangs gavel*