who's on judge mathis today? #254
an idiotic recap of the greatest syndicated courtroom show of all time
plaintiff: chantre from aberdeen proving ground, maryland. chantre strides confidently into the courtroom wearing a hot pink single-button ¾ sleeve bolero blazer (??????) with wide hot pink lapels over a white bodysuit and black-and-white striped knit pencil skirt. chantre is wearing a thick gold chain and giant gold hoop earrings, blush, lipstick, and a ~fresh~ silk press. i’m talking so fresh you can see smoke rising from her roots. it’s been a minute since we’ve been graced with the presence of a bonafide glamazon!!!!!!!!!!!!
defendant: quincy from cincinatti, ohio. quincy is wearing a black dress shirt and pants paired with a shiny purple tie, and not me moonlighting as a writer for gentlemen’s quarterly, BUT: his tie is distractingly short! i mean, it doesn’t reach his belly button? which okay who cares but without a jacket over it your eyes can’t help but to follow his jaunty little necktie like one of those bouncing ball singalong videos we had to rely on back in the day to teach us how to read. quincy is probably too young to have learned spelling from steamboat mickey, what with his smooth and shiny poreless skin and fully black beard. or maybe he has a fountain of youth stuffed in his accordion of truth™.
the complaint: chantre says she agreed to cash a check for quincy but it turned out to be fraudulent so she’s suing!!!!
what does she want: $3240??? excuse me????? (i’m sorry but regular people are legally not allowed to cash a check this big unless it comes from a verifiable corporation or government body!!)
how it went down: chantre begins by saying that quincy is her older brother and throughout her life he has modeled good behavior for her and their other siblings, teaching them how to make it out in this cold world, etc etc. that’s sweet and i hope they don’t do what my siblings and i would do in this same situation: immediately devolve from upstanding citizens who wore their best stretchy black pants to be on TV into tooth-gnashing feral cats arguing about some dumb shit from 1987.
quincy says he’s always been like a father figure to chantre, even though he’s only four years older than she is. he says he taught her how to drive, taught her how to cook, and that he always looked out for “her little boyfriends and stuff.” quincy repeats the line that every oldest sibling on the planet keeps permanently perched on the tips of their tongues: “my little [sibling] is so spoiled.” as the baby i feel like i gotta jump in here and say okay yes, we got the older, nicer (read: fully fucking exhausted) version of our parents, but we deserve it for being stuck with whatever the older kids already fucked up!!!!! hand-me-down toys, hand-me-down clothes, hand-me-down house, hand-me-down mom: yeah i’m not going to apologize for not having the same chores, i’m too busy being forced to play the clarinet you abandoned and wearing your ill-fitting old shoes.
quincy’s evidence of chantre’s spoilage is that when their mother bought her a car, she put a license plate on it that says QUEEN. i mean……………….i might feel like royalty too if someone gave me a fucking FREE CAR??? although the license plate on my stupid ass car has the italian word for “guts” on it, so maybe i’m a bad person to ask. quincy tells the judge not to let chantre’s sweet courtroom demeanor fool him, this is a woman who submitted an audition tape for THEE bad girls club??? i am so sorry but that’s fucking iconic.
chantre immediately pivots and says that yeah okay quincy was a good brother or whatever but he also taught her how to do a lot of bad stuff, which is exactly how i would play it after my sister repaid my many compliments with a bunch of hurtful slander!!! chantre says that one day she was chilling at home and her brother called and said “hey sis, could you cash this check for me?” and she said of course. now chantre literally just got finished entertaining us with a little anecdote about how quincy’s electric bill used to be in her name because he’d fucked up his finances, so babe i’m afraid this one’s is on you!
so chantre has quincy meet her at the bank, they deposit the check and chantre gives quincy the money. a few days later chantre receives a letter in the mail stating that her account is overdrawn by thousands of dollars because the check she cashed was fraudulent, so she’s on the hook for the amount of that check and all the associated fees. she immediately calls quincy, who says 1 the check was from someone who hired him for a job off craigslist (OH NO) and 2 the money is already gone.
storytime!! our old house had jotul two wood stoves, one working and one that probably worked but was attached to a chimney that didn’t pass inspection and also bats kept flying down that raggedy chimney into it and i’m not catching rabies so fuck that. those stoves are worth a lot of money so when i got tired of looking at it in the sun room i was like “okay let’s find someone who wants this old timey shit so i can put a bigger TV in here” and kirsten put an ad on craigslist. we didn’t expect any traction because the damn thing weighed a thousand pounds and hadn’t felt the heat of a fire in it since the 70s, but she immediately got a message from a guy in kentucky who claimed that not only did he want to relieve us of that eyesore, he would pay double and also send men to pick it up! the world is full of freaks so if this guy says he collects broken old stoves and wants to buy mine then why wouldn’t i believe him??? long story extremely long, some scammer sent a huge check via fedex to the house, texted kirsten on the hour to ask if it had arrived (RED FLAG!!!), then begged her to deposit it as soon as possible. but the check looked funny to her, plus all his frantic texting, so she started looking up craigslist scams and discovered the game: the scammer prints out a real-looking check from a fake bank for an amount higher than you expected, gets you to deposit that bullshit check at your own bank, then immediately gives you some sob story about why they can no longer go through with the deal. you, a sweet and gullible person, feel terrible for whatever heartbreaking occurrence ruined their dream of purchasing your [secondhand portable furnace] and wire your actual money back to them, then in a week your bank tries to send you to prison for check fraud. incredible, right?????? kirsten just stopped responding and our scammer quickly vanished into the ether, because that’s the kind of scam that you have to successfully execute within a couple of business days, before the bank catches up to you, so i’m guessing he assumed that she figured out his trick and moved on to someone else trying to offload some old junk. it can’t be that lucrative of a business, dude must be wasting tons of fedex priority overnight fees!!!!!!!!
chantre says the bank took her money and froze her accounts, and when she confronted her brother he promised to pay her back because he’d spent it all already. i would love to know what he spent $3200 on in four days, i bet that shit was FUN. quincy says that everything chantre is alleging is true and that he used the money to pay “previous bills,” which i understand but also i wish he’d been like “dude, i went to jamaica!!!!!!!!!!” i also wanna know what the scam was, and lucky for me quincy says that the ad he responded to stated there was an immediate signing bonus for accepting an unspecified part-time position at a company that may or may not exist, and he didn’t think twice when $3200 from a stranger for a job whose duties he cannot list landed in his mailbox. my brain is pretty fucking smooth, but this? imagine how full of delight and wonder your life must be when your head is this empty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the ruling: you already know how this is gonna go. it’s been two goddamn years (!!!) and quincy hasn’t given kind, patient chantre as much as a spare twenty dollar bill, despite having purchased a new escalade along with paying all those outstanding bills. the judge wants to know why and quincy kinda laughs and shrugs him off but the babies of the family know why: BECAUSE SHE’S THE LITTLE SISTER. older siblings don’t believe in owing the younger ones money, they think everything is their birthright or maybe they consider it a tax for having to be experimented on before your parents really knew what to do with a baby? either way, quincy better pay this young woman who probably had to sleep in his old threadbare jammies back her many thousands of dollars! judgment for the baby, because greg obviously understands the extreme importance of birth order!!!
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “you conned your little sister and now you’re trying to con me???”