who's on judge mathis today? #249
an idiotic recap of the greatest syndicated show of all time
plaintiff: maurice from omaha, nebraska. ooh, i love a white man named maurice. you just know he’s got a delfonics cassette jammed into the tape deck of his 1983 cutlass supreme. maurice is decked out in a deep blue dress shirt and black slacks, his collar unbuttoned just enough that i hope we get a glimpse of some luxurious chest hairs before this case is over. speaking of, the hair on his head is shoulder length and curled under like lord farquaad, and his face hair (a long goatee situation) looks freshly sculpted and combed!
defendant: jason from la vista, nebraska. jason is a tall, lean bar of hershey’s special dark, clearly repurposing his prom outfit (anytime anyone is wearing a black dress shirt with a shiny tie i can’t help think of a high school gym with streamers taped to the ceiling) and i am impressed because this young man has brought absolutely nothing with him to court today. not a single scrap of paper! maurice has an accordion of truth™ so thick i thought it was a phone book at first, so this is gonna either be great fun or the worst massacre in television court history. onward!
the complaint: maurice says jason dated his daughter (uh oh) for five years, but he always had a violent streak and now he’s suing him for car damages.
what does he want: $3500 sheesh!!
how it went down: maurice says jason and his daughter were in a serious relationship for five years and that he an his wife took jason in as part of their family. omg imagine living with your girlfriend’s family, the amount of stress and self-consciousness would actually break my brain. it’s hard enough to be in a friend’s house just for a visit without constantly worrying about the dumb shit you might say or breaking a thing you can’t afford to replace but living full time with your girlfriend’s dad??? i would rub my fucking fingerprints off with all the scrubbing and folding i would be doing so they wouldn’t think i was a burden. (let’s talk sometime about my recent OCD diagnosis, shall we? i’m on 200mg of zoloft a day, you could stab me with a pencil and i wouldn’t feel it, but also i am fully nuts.) anyway what i’m trying to say is i am too self-conscious to even urinate at my in-laws’ house, the (self-inflicted) stress of living with them while trying to be the neatest, tidiest houseguest who doesn’t ever need anything and makes zero noise would cause me to physically break down.
maurice says that he has two grandkids fathered by jason that also live with them, and now i’m relieved because any big messes jason can just blame on a child. i “haven’t broken anything” in six years, it’s a dream! maurice says that jason started to become violent and disrespectful with his daughter a couple years ago, and yikes sorry bud you can’t “____ spilled it, not me!” your way out of that. maurice says jason broke doors down and destroyed furniture at the apartment [jason] used to live in with his daughter, and he also saw bruises on her arms on several occasions. maurice says that he confronted his daughter about her injuries but she would never admit that the bruises were from jason even though they clearly were, and once again i wish this courtroom had a pissed off MMA fighter instead of a bailiff glowering in the corner.
maurice says she’s his baby daughter and he loves her very much, which is why he and his wife have tried to work things out with jason, despite his attacks on both her and them??? my dad threw a molotov cocktail in my sister’s boyfriend’s car (i miss the 80s!!!) when he broke her fourteen-year-old heart, and yes he was a very bad person and that’s an extremely fucked up thing to do but also i have been conditioned to believe that is what love looks like and how men should behave. the mystery of my not ending up the wife of a monosyllabic, snuff-chewing cowboy may never be solved!! anyway maurice says that he’s not putting up with this shit anymore and his daughter broke up with jason a few weeks ago.
jason begins with “first of all, your honor, i’ve never laid a hand on sarah.” he says that things often got heated, and when they did sarah “yelled at” him while he simply “walked away” to deescalate the argument. mm hmm, okay then! jason says that all he does is work hard every day to dutifully take care of sarah and their two children, ages 1 and 2, with “absolutely no help at all,” which is why they have to live with her parents and eat food her parents provide and drive her parents’ car and use her parents’ electricity and heat and water.
jason says that he has a very good job, yet sarah is always running to her parents and making him look bad by telling them she needs money for bills he won’t pay, despite his insistence that he’s paid them. jason says they finally broke up because he came home one night and sarah had people over (including two “male friends”) and she told him he couldn’t come in the house and that if he did she’d call the police on him so jason was like “we’re over, goodbye.” a story like this is hard to only hear one side of, but it seems like the truth if for no other reason than that it sounds too ridiculous to not be true.
maurice interrupts to say that’s not an accurate depiction of their relationship’s end, and i don’t know why greg hates this man but he does so he angrily cuts him off. the judge says jason has been nothing but kind and respectful in court (it’s true, i guess?) while maurice has huffed and puffed and repeatedly interjected during jason’s testimony. greg says that jason is directly involved and maurice only knows what he does via hearsay from his daughter, so he believes jason. this is not what i expected from noted male feminist gregory mathis, but i suppose this is the law we’re dealing with? hence the “hearsay.” so far there’s been no photo or video evidence to back up maurice’s abuse claim, which is wild because what the fuck does he have in that double stuf accordion??? pull out some goddamn polaroids!!!!!!!
idk if maurice said something racist during the break or what but greg is tearing him a new asshole over the two men at the house thing, because maurice is insisting they’re his daughter’s friends but jason says he had no idea who they were (the subtext being that maybe she was cheating…? or they were gonna jump him…….? honestly it’s hard to suss out) and greg is (very loudly) trying to make the point to maurice that if jason didn’t know them then he had a right to be pissed that they were there. why is maurice even arguing about this, the end result was that jason broke up with the woman maurice is alleging he’d been abusive to, why not just move past……………….whatever this whole thing is and get to what he’s actually suing for????
phew, finally: maurice says jason did destructive damage to his 2003 ford escape, specifically that he slashed the tires and did $5500 worth of damage to the paint. greg (jovial all of sudden, giggly even, which is jarring!!!) laughs and says he believes jason pays his bills but he also looks like the kind of guy who’d fuck up a car in a rage and he could tell that from the jump. i am helplessly confused. what’s happening here, i cannot tell what the vibe is or who’s right. i need the raw, unedited footage to make sense of what is going on in this room, because i am getting whiplash from riding this tidal wave of rapidly shifting emotions!
maurice cracks open his monstrous accordion of truth™ and starts pulling out receipts and pictures of the car, and it’s interesting that he thought to bring 187 pictures and accompanying documents for a nineteen-year-old car but not a single snapshot of the damage jason caused to his daughter. “sorry honey, can you limp your blackened eyes and shattered bones to left a little bit? you’re blocking the shot of the chipped tail light i need for court!” come on, maurice!! unless these damages were caused by him driving back and forth over jason after he saw the first bruise on his kid, my man needs to get his priorities together!! he should be in murder court!!!!!!!!!
the ruling: jason admits straight up that he did fuck maurice’s car up and wow what a breath of fresh air? i almost started laughing! no one ever admits to the shit they do!! but he also says that he believes maurice is juicing him on the repairs. turns out that jason destroyed the car on the same night that the two mystery men were over (let me interject to say that neither of these gentlemen have clarified who those men were or what they were doing with the daughter, but the way the judge loses his shit every time they are mentioned is funny but also read as unhinged without that context) and jason also cops to kicking in a door and tearing up some furniture. so much for all those deescalating walkaways!
despite whatever ungodly act the judge has decided happened in the house between sarah and her two strange men, maurice continues to argue about jason’s past behaviors instead of talking about the car damage and as a father of daughters i absolutely understand the urge to defend your daughter’s honor on national TV from whatever gangbang narrative these dudes are implying, but it just makes greg fly off the handle and that is excruciating to us all just get back to the paint job and smashed windows or whatever please i am begging!
greg’s mood snaps back from mean dad to fun dad (whiplash!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and he commends maurice for not beating jason’s ass because if his daughter told him all the stuff sarah told her dad of course he’d believe her and then he’d try to kill him. bro what. the judge spent seven literal minutes insinuating that sarah (whom he’s never met) disrespected jason cavorting with some suspicious dudes (who aren’t here to set the record straight) and now he’s on some “daddy’s little girl” shit? let’s get this over with, i’m tired!
maurice has a bunch of printed-out text sheets™ filled with dozens and dozens of weepy, apologetic texts from jason both expressing remorse for damaging the car and offering to give him “his whole check” to pay for it. what are we doing here then??? apparently, immediately after sending those jason flipped his switch from sorry dad to scammy dad and told maurice that he wouldn’t pay for the damages because he could “fix them himself,” and maurice didn’t buy those wolf tickets because they were already in a fight plus jason is not a fucking mechanic. can you believe these people have to be connected to each other for the rest of their lives after this???????? GEEZ LOUISE. judgment for the plaintiff, who’s getting $2403+ more than the kelley blue book says his car is even worth.
should i……………………..go to law school? i mean, how did no one check that?? this could’ve been my corporal barnes moment!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “what were they doing, your daughter and these men? having bible study???”