who’s on judge mathis today? #211
an idiotic recap of the greatest syndicated courtroom show of all time
plaintiff: darnell from milwaukee, wisconsin. darnell storms into the courtroom with the confidence of a man who knows he can’t lose, which i admire. he appears to be anywhere between 42 and 97 years old, walgreens readers perched precariously on the tip of his nose and the outline of a newports softpack visible through the breast pocket of his too-sheeny dress shirt. my dad was a kools man but i’d recognize that rounded rectangle shape anywhere!!!!!!!!!!!
defendant: tommy from milwaukee, wisconsin. tommy looks like a high school linebacker at winter formal, just a massive slab of a dude in a flat black dress shirt and blue tie wearing what i like to call “athlete glasses”: small wire-rimmed rectangles with wide arms that have some kind of design etched into them and have a little bit of stretch to accommodate a 24" circumference head. you guys know what i’m talking about, right? do a google image search for “shaq glasses” and scroll through the first page to get a taste. or you can just click on this incredible inside the nba clip i’ve watched 10,000+ times and see what i mean (and also laugh).
the complaint: darnell says he bought a computer from tommy and the monitor broke, so he tried returning it but tommy refused to take it back and they got into an altercation.
what does he want: $5000?!!?!?!!?? what kind of computer is this, the one that runs amazon?????
how it went down: okay i love when people start off like “hey judge, big fan, here’s what i ate for breakfast the morning i met the defendant” but i also love darnell’s method, just jumping into the shallow end headfirst: “I WENT INTO THIS MAN’S STORE AND HE WOULDN’T REFUND MY BUSTED COMPUTER!!!!!!!!!!!” it’s honestly hard to keep up because my man is talking so fast, but basically he bought his kids a computer, the monitor started “acting up,” darnell took it back to tommy’s shop to either get it fixed or his money back, and tommy said NO GET OUTTA MY STORE. damn man, sometimes it takes 7 real minutes to get to the facts!!! darnell is clearly trying to beat rush hour traffic on 94 to get home.
in addition to telling darnell he wouldn’t give him a refund tommy also told him to get the fuck out his store, so darnell took out his phone and called the police. is this……….what 911 is for????? imagine you’re on hold dying from a bullet wound and the operator is like “one sec, ma’am…all available units are on their way to best buy.” okay so darnell has a seat (didn’t dude ask him to gtfo?) while on the phone with the cops and tommy gets in his face, threatening to beat his ass. tommy knocks the phone out of darnell’s hand and knocks his glasses off in the process, then puts darnell in a headlock. okay i know i said that i love the frenetic pace with which darnell is telling this story but how did we actually get here? he’s got my man out here fighting off a colossal clutch over a compaq 6000????????
darnell says he “scraped an eye, bit [his] tongue, and aggravated a groin injury” while trying to escape tommy’s headlock, but those just sound like sex wounds to me. darnell says that while tommy was beating his ass he was thinking “what have i gotten myself into here?” and that’s hilarious, and greg is like “i bet you’ll obey that instruction to leave next time, huh” and darnell shouts “AMEN! but i didn’t think i was going there to get beat up, i just thought i was getting a monitor!” wow he is really stressing me out but i kind of love him?
darnell freed himself from tommy’s headlock, biting his tongue in the process, sees that tommy is pressed against the wall, then pulls tommy’s legs out from under him and holds him on the ground as the cops listen (have been on the phone this whole time) to him shouting “THIS MAN IS TRYING TO KILL ME.” i’m not an mma guy or anything, BUT: if darnell swept tommy’s legs and is actively sitting on his chest to keep him on the floor is he not………………….attempting to kill tommy!??!!?!!
tommy apparently started apologizing (how with darnell crushing his lungs?) and darnell was like “too late, cops are on the way!” darnell hands doyle a ream of paperwork detailing the treatments for his “groin injury” (idk how many times i can write that without puking down the front of my shirt) but greg interrupts him like, “wait a minute, what happened with the police?” i gotta pause and say that darnell has delivered all of the above information in approximately 37 seconds, he is talking so face that i wonder if he has to poop or something? i’m all for efficiency (no i’m not) but this is out of control, i have to keep rewinding it because this man is positively racing through this story and i can’t keep track of what i am hearing. the police arrived and, having aurally witnessed the entire fracas, ask darnell if he would like to press charges. that seems awfully convenient to me but let’s good with it. darnell says he didn’t want to get tommy in trouble so he said no, but when he went to shake tommy’s hand he wouldn’t accept it at first but relented when he was reminded of the cops looming nearby. darnell said that he was going to leave well enough alone, but then tommy was supposed to mail him the glasses he knocked off his face and didn’t, so he decided to “take the law into [his] own hands.”
CAN TOMMY TALK PLEASE. darnell seems like a very nice young/old man, but his energy is making me jittery. people who vibrate at a super high energy are fascinating to me, but i don’t want to see or hear them for more than five minutes because it’s deeply unsettling. this man has not taken a breath, my goodness. okay finally, red (tommy’s version): the first time tommy met darnell, he sold him a computer and a wifi adapter. he showed him how it worked in his office and darnell left happy. a month before the altercation darnell messaged tommy saying that his monitor was broken and tommy told him to bring it back to his office. darnell’s complaint was that the monitor wouldn’t stay on, but tommy hooked it up in his office and determined that it worked just fine and told darnell he wouldn’t replace it. tommy says when he told darnell the monitor worked just fine for him he became disruptive and tommy asked him to leave the store. darnell became loud and disrespectful and threatening then charged tommy and they “got locked up.”
it’s a good time to point out that darnell has brought his daughter with him to court today, the day of her eighth grade graduation, to testify as a witness. i’m not sure i want to hear from a literal child when tommy says he has a transcript of the 911 call??? but okay i guess! she says she heard a lot of people yelling but couldn’t really hear what was going down, and boy i bet she wishes she was in a middle school gym in a cheap, itchy gown with all her little friends instead.
okay now it’s getting juicy. tommy whips a thick stack of papers from his accordion of truth™ and waves them around, saying “mister beal used to have a pest control business called ‘dino’s pest control’ and he lost his license for a number of bad practices, so now he makes his money suing businesses and people. in the last two years he’s been involved in 22 civil suits and here they all are.” HOLY COW. greg thumbs through it real quick and discovers, with a great deal of incredulity, that darnell has sued some of the same companies multiple times, and tommy says, “well, in that case, i guess i’ll be BACK.”
the ruling: darnell brags that if he gets stiffed on a business deal he runs straight to [the lawsuit filing place] and i’m laughing imagining all the exasperated waukesha county judges dealing with this bullshit. darnell’s daughter is looking at him like “dang daddy, that’s how you get down?????” and i am having ptsd flashbacks to how wild it feels when you discover your dad is a lowlife. i have a hundred examples, but the one that popped in my head first was this time i was at the corner store after school (buying funyuns probably??) and the man behind the counter kept the change from a fucking ten dollar bill and i was like “hey!” and he shrugged and said “sam owes me for an eight ball.” i didn’t even know what that meant but i didn’t want to get my little fourth grade ass kicked so i just went home and called him an asshole. (in my mind, are you kidding me??? he would’ve run me over with a truck!) anyway, darnell’s daughter is looking at him like that and i feel bad he dragged her here for this.
darnell says that yes he loves lawsuits and yes he loooves calling the police, he’s even called them on his wife several times. shit, i do not like a man who moves like this!!!!!!! also, further traumatizing his daughter this casually is gross. his energy is so chirpy and upbeat but darnell also seems like a terrible fucking person who will try to have you thrown in jail for the slightest infraction and then play the victim and i hate it. i totally believe tommy, that he checked the monitor and darnell got loud when he couldn’t get what he wanted before immediately pivoting to whatever this performance he is giving us today so the police would believe him. also how many actual crimes went unsolved while this dude called officers to deal with a dispute over a wifi booster or whatever this is???
greg asks darnell if he’s ever sued his wife (OHMYGOD) and he says no but wow o wow would i love to be a fly on the wall in their house. can you imagine being saddled with a husband like this? i would move out in the middle of the night and never call my friends or family again. just start over in the middle of montana with a bag of clothes and a flip phone. this isn’t worth the hassle!
greg reads a hospital report (??) that details darnell’s injuries and they sound pretty bad and it’s looking like the chips may fall in darnell’s favor but also: tommy asked him to leave the store and he wouldn’t. OH SHIT, GOTCHA BABE. greg is like “i know you said you were being peaceful but when tommy asked you to leave his place of business you wouldn’t, that’s a violation” and hell yeah brother, the customer is wrong, as a front desk-manning wage slave down to my core i am absolutely salivating at this. one time when i was working at the animal hospital this miserable bitch leaned over the counter and hung up the phone call i was on because she thought it sounded “too friendly” and she was in a hurry to buy dog food, and i was like “that wasn’t my friend i’m just a nice person and this is good customer service FUCK YOU” and she spluttered in shock and asked for the manager but i was the fucking manager, literally eat my ass and take your decrepit shih tzu somewhere else you piece of shit. it’s such a good feeling to tell someone their money doesn’t matter and to get the fuck outta your store. it’s like having an orgasm in the middle of your job while strangers are watching. but, uhhhh according to the mountain of paperwork darnell presents at the very last second, tommy has been charged with battery upwards of six times (that’s a lot of shitty modems!) and judgment for the plaintiff, who will hopefully use some of that money to buy his way back into his daughter’s good graces.
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “i don’t know how good you are at your job but you sure do know how to file a lawsuit!”
*bangs gavel*