who's on judge mathis today? #250
an idiotic recap of the greatest syndicated courtroom show of all time
plaintiff: nakeba from st. george, south carolina. nakeba strides confidently into court wearing this super saturated electric flamingo fitted dress with matching nails, and she’s got thick gorgeous braids plus freshly-waxed brows (those of us who came of age in the “pluck ‘em thin enough to slice deli meat” era know a freshly-yanked eyebrow when we see one) and vivid red lipstick. she looks so fancy and important!
defendant: ryan and bianca lewis from st. louis, missouri. wild that these litigants are from two totally different “saint” places!! anyway, ryan and bianca enter the courtroom with the kind of solemnity that lets me know immediately that he cheated on her and she has not and will never forgive his ass. idk babe, if you stay with him you eventually gotta let it go, because holding that kind of grudge is like being in prison. i mean, i love being mad but it’s hard to maintain when you’re angry with a person you have to see every single day because they live in your house??? why torture yourself????? either kick him out and get a hot revenge boyfriend or stay married and find some zen about it (read: ask your doctor for benzos).
the complaint: nakeba says she lived with ryan until she discovered he was actually married (SEE????) when his wife (the co-defendant) sent her a message calling her a homewrecker, and now she’s suing them both for property and emotional distress.
what does she want: $5000, THE MAXIMUM!!! oh goody, ryan and bianca have filed a countersuit (please, god, why) for $2500 for storage fees and their emotional distress.
how it went down: nakeba says she met ryan in hawaii because that’s where they were stationed in the military. at the time she was going through a divorce, and they immediately connected because ryan said he was divorced, too. i do not have the vocabulary to accurately describe how furious bianca looks at this moment, but she is positively vibrating with rage. if i squint i can see literal smoke coming out of her ears!! nakeba skips a lot of storytelling steps and says one day bianca messaged her on facebook and told her she knew she was banging her husband and that nakeba wasn’t the only person ryan was messing with, and i’m sorry but could greg get in here and help shape this narrative please? like what the hell happened between “hi i’m divorced” and “bitch stop fucking my man”?????? i need my exposition! my rising action! my climax!!!!!
nakeba starts talking about how every time she messaged ryan bianca would “be in [her] inbox” and greg is like “i don’t know what you’re talking about” then nakeba says she’s suing for her “freezer, bedroom set, xbox one, and TV set,” and i’m sorry but where is the editor, what is the backstory! i was just editing the manuscript for my new book so maybe i’m a little on edge about having a story picked apart (a real note from the copyeditor in the margin: “i don’t think this joke is hitting the way you want it to” lmaoo) but like, is it too much to ask her to tell us how he came to possess said freezer? i mean, a left behind hoodie and curling iron i understand, but how did this man get your bedside tables, ma’am??
greg is fully exasperated, and he says “where’s your stuff?” and nakeba says “he shipped it to st. louis” and greg finally snaps. “FROM WHERE? HOW DID HE GET IT?? DID YOU LIVE TOGETHER???” fucking finally! nakeba says that she moved in with ryan shortly after they got together, and they lived in his place for five months until he got kicked out of the military and the government told him to give them their fucking house back. ryan told nakeba that he would ship all of their stuff to his mom’s house in st. louis and she was cool with it. it was going to take the army a month to get the furniture to ryan’s mom’s place, so nakeba (we still have no idea what she was doing in hawaii or what she was gonna do until they could be together again but who cares i guess) flew back to her home in south carolina and waited for ryan to let her know when to meet him in missouri. they were still together, they had plans to remain together, but after nakeba arrived home she says ryan stopped taking her calls. okay now this is getting juicy!!
ryan says that he and his wife were separated at the time he met nakeba, and after they started dating he “considered getting into a relationship with her.” I’M SORRY??? y’all lived together!!!!!!! okay maybe his ~consideration~ period was before they moved in tog—welp, nope, ryan clarifies that he really is the kind of asshole who could be in deep cohabitation with someone and still not consider himself in a relationship. i’m fucking weeping, this is so rude!
ryan says he went home after he got kicked out of the military and realized he wanted his family back. listen, that’s commendable, but at the very least he didn’t think he owed nakeba a phone call to be like “sorry babe, my wife that you didn’t know about until just now is making turkey tetrazzini for dinner so i’m deciding to be married again and i’m keeping this xbox thank you, bye?” come on, brother! you can’t give that small courtesy to a person you liked enough to live with her???
ryan launches into a whole thing about being a father etc etc and the judge cuts him off saying “that’s a beautiful story, but what happened to her stuff?” he pivots and starts with all this gobbledygook about shipping costs and how expensive it would’ve been to divide their belongings and ship them separately, and it just occurred to me that he might currently be snuggling up every night in the bed nakeba bought and my blood pressure spiked. ryan tries to detour again and greg stops him again, demanding to know the specifics of where and how and to whom ryan sent nakeba’s shit. first he says it was sent to his grandmother, then he corrects himself to say actually he had it shipped to his mom’s house when he was discharged in november. greg asks when ryan talked to nakeba after they’d left hawaii and he says not until the end of january.
JANUARY WHAT THE FUCK, BRO. i would absolutely lose my mind! because at that point nakeba doesn’t know that he’s cozied up with his wife watching romcoms on her TV, all she knows is that he (and her mattress, et al) have gone missing for 2+ months. nakeba doesn’t know dude’s family, she has no idea what’s going on, just that her boyfriend disappeared into the ether or is maybe dead, and that is a stunningly cruel thing to do to a person. omg the spiral i would be spiraling if this happened to me!!!!!!!
ryan says that he arranged for the furniture to be delivered in february and i’m sorry but is someone swimming with it from hawaii because why on earth did it take so goddamn long? okay this is a little confusing but apparently the furniture arrived at ryan’s mom’s house and he and bianca went through it to figure out what belonged to whom, then put nakeba’s things in the basement. the judge asks ryan if he gave nakeba an opportunity to come pick it up, but from what i can put together it sounds like this is the point when bianca took it upon herself to start messaging nakeba calling her names and shit and telling her to come get her stuff. that’s according to ryan, bianca is standing next to him in silence, probably fantasizing about killing him.
ryan says that in april his mom decided she was sick of this woman’s stuff in her basement, so he packed nakeba’s things and put them in storage. greg is like “did you tell her you were doing that? at any time during this ordeal did you arrange for her to collect her things?” and ryan says, so help me god, “well that was between her and my wife.” i was waiting for judge mathis to boil over and here it comes, he loses his ever-loving mind on ryan, yelling at him that his wife shouldn’t even be in court with him today after this shit he’s pulling, and that it’s absolutely NOT her responsibility to coordinate travel accommodations for his unwitting mistress’s hawaiian end tables!!!!!!!!!
the ruling: also it’s worth circling back to note that the messages bianca was sending weren’t like “hey girl, need me to rent the u-haul when you get here?” she was calling her a slut and a whore or whatever, how dare this man! just imagine being assigned the task of figuring out logistics with your cheating husband’s live-in girlfriend who had no idea you even existed!!! greg is sick of this fucking shit, and he asks nakeba when she last spoke to ryan. she says that the second of the two times she’s spoken to him since they left hawaii (two calls in six months??? i’m sick) ryan told her that her stuff was in storage and she should come get it out. no address, no “here’s the entry code,” nothing. this is so fucking gross. greg thinks so, too, and declares victory for the plaintiff and dismisses ryan’s counterclaim in one fell swoop. bianca tries to pipe up after the verdict about the money they wanted from nakeba (more nerve than a toothache, i swear) and greg shouts “you shouldn’t even be here! this is between them!!” good for nakeba. five grand will buy a lot of xboxes!!
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “you should’ve taken that as a sign! if the army didn’t want him, you shouldn’t either!”
*bangs gavel*