plaintiff: jack from orange, california. black suit, white shirt, red tie. he looks like he just got out of boarding school, which immediately made me think of that brendan fraser movie where he was in in boarding school with those douchebags who hated him for being jewish. y’all remember that shit? remember when all you (read: i) wanted to do was climb brendan fraser like a tree? also matt damon, ben affleck, and chris o’donnell were in that shit! if i had been in that movie it would have been on lifetime and called “somehow pregnant by a minimum of five different young men.”
defendant: lauren from rancho santo margarita, california. wearing all black with an olive green blazer, letting her accordion of truth™ lead her way into the courtroom. she looks very sweet and innocent, which makes me extremely nervous!
the complaint: jack and lauren dated until jack realized she was “insane” (uh huh) because she was always accusing him of cheating (UH HUH).
what does he want: $2500 for rent and damaged property
how it went down: jack and lauren started dating THEIR JUNIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL. oh brother. man, i knew these were children! after they graduated, they decided to go to the same college (bad idea) and get an apartment to live in together (worse idea). everything was great in september, but in october jack found out that lauren was “insane.” greg asks how so and jack tells this story about taking lauren to a halloween party where he spent the night talking to girls other than her and she ended up berating him, asking why he was cheating on her. he says he told her to “chillax” because he was just having a conversation, and yo i’m on team lauren fuck if you’re gonna tell me to “chillax” and then call me insane. can you imagine a person actually commanding you to chillax?! i would chillax behind the wheel of a truck as i drove it over his lifeless body!
lauren interjects to say that jack, who sounds like a used car salesman slash personal injury lawyer, had cheated on her prior to that, which is why her hackles were raised. this is why we gotta be radically honest about what we will accept from people, because if you’re gonna spend the rest of your life on edge maybe you should just cut that person loose. if i know i’m gonna spend our relationship flinching every time i even hear the word pizza because you fucked the domino’s delivery driver, i’m just gonna do us both a favor and put a bullet in that. lauren clearly needs new friends!
lauren’s side of the party story is that jack spent the entire night sitting with his arm around a woman he was close-talking with, and everybody knows what that means. or shit, maybe we don’t. is that a casual gesture these days, the arm-around-your-shoulders-pulling-you-close move? i’m old and sick so if you see a person with their arms wrapped around me they’re probably holding me up waiting for an ambulance to arrive, but this young man looks spry as fuck. and they broke up after that! good for lauren!!! but then they hooked up during their break, which lauren took as a sign that they were back together.
a couple days later jack brought a girl back to the apartment they shared (reader, i gasped) and they started to head for the bedroom and lauren says she “lost it.” bitch, i bet! sir, we just had what i thought was makeup sex and i’m supposed to sit calmly on this ikea couch and listen to you fuck another woman on our same sheets? i don’t care about anything enough to scream or be violent, but whenever he came out of his room he would discover that i had quietly packed my clothes & electronics and moved out and he would never hear from me again. i would switch schools, change my number, and delete my instagram, BYE.
the ruling: jack says that lauren’s reaction to this gobsmacking level of disrespect was to take his baseball bat off the wall and start swinging it at him. i was not prepared for this revelation. this girl looks like, man i don’t even know, a nine year old? a bird who shops at chicos? she is very thin and softspoken, she looks like she makes applesauce muffins for preschool snack day, definitely not like the kind of person who would SWING AT A DUDE WITH A BAT. alright, lauren!
jack says that he made a mistake bringing the girl home, but he felt justified because lauren hadn’t paid any rent. this shit starts early, huh. anyway, lauren took her tiny arms and swing that bat into jack’s tv, shattering it. then she moved to the kitchen, found a stack of his “antique plates,” and started ricocheting them off the walls. he’s lucky that she didn’t bust him upside the head with that bat, but man i feel bad for him because nothing means more to me than my television, not even my health and/or safety. but he’s not suing her about the tv (or is he? it’s hard to tell) and he produces a lease from his accordion and says their rent was $800 a month, which they were supposed to split down the middle but lauren lost her job and he had to cover her. lauren’s version is that he said he’d cover her and never told him she had to pay him back. greg’s version is that this is him telling her he owes him.
okay so yes jack is suing for the cost of his samsung smart tv and the plates and the rent, and he hands doyle a typed-up sheet of all the debts. lauren’s defense is that he owes her for years of emotional terrorism due to his constant cheating, which is only a viable defense in the samantha irby court of ex-boyfriend revenge. judgment for the plaintiff.
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “why’d you bring another woman home? man, you asked to be swung at! what did you think she was gonna do, have dinner prepared for you all?”
*bangs gavel*