who's on judge mathis today? #270
an idiotic recap of the greatest syndicated courtroom show of all time
plaintiff: stacy from las vegas, nevada. i was in new york on saturday and while at dinner with my 30-year-old friend (this matters, i promise) mimi she casually brought up the time last summer i sent her a picture of me modeling several of my sister’s luxurious wigs. we were all in indianapolis for my nephew’s wedding, and my oldest sister brought no fewer than seven wigs for the occasion. i get it, i don’t even go to the grocery store without a bonus pair of pants!! the night before the ceremony we gathered in carmen’s suite to catch up (ie, gossip about our sister’s future in-laws) and i put on a wig fashion show. the one i liked the best was extremely similar to this britney lace front from the vivica a. fox collection and i was gonna wear it to the club but then carmen yelled at me to take it off before i “sweat the curl out.” wait a minute, SPEAKING OF VIVICA A FOX: i had the absolute pleasure of reading her autobiography slash motivational business memoir (???) for chelsea’s glamorous trash podcast and if you want to hear me get gooey-eyed over how romantic 50 cent is then wow you are in for a treat!! anyway, saturday night mimi brings up the wigs and i bring up jimmy butler’s emo hair and i said “he got a hawaiian silky” and laughed in my fucking face before reminding me that i was born in 1980 and no one gets those now that we live in the future. oh i’m sorry, are you telling me that the gworls don’t use creme of nature anymore? are you really trying to get me to believe that nobody in america has that yellow bucket of motions perched precariously on the side of their bathtub????? someone put me in a casket!!!!
defendant: seandee from hawaiian gardens, california. the point, of all THAT: these women have gorgeous hair and i’m self-conscious about describing it because i don’t know the right words anymore. i was deep in my sinead o’connor bag and shaved my hair off in 1996, man! i don’t know shit!!!!!!! stacy is wearing a platinum blonde wig (i think) featuring a lavender ombre situation that gets gradually darker toward the ends, and seandee has her hair in microbraids that are a deeper shade of blonde (kinda bronze-y? but cooler) and loose at the ends. both women are dressed in black, which i assume is to let the hair be the beyonce of the group.
the complaint: stacy is a hairstylist and claims seandee posted disparaging pictures of her online and made false comments about her business so now she’s suing for harassment and defamation.
what does she want: $5000 alright alright alright, big money no whammies!!! countersuit filed because why not? seandee would like her own $5000 for slander, which is different from defamation i guess but i am not looking that shit up!!!
how it went down: stacy kicks things off by saying she is the proud owner of lady lush beauty lounge and seandee has been harassing her for five years. 1: how fucking glamorous would you feel calling to make an appointment at a place called LADY LUSH?? do you have to buy a cigarette holder and marabou slippers before you can go in there????? and 2: five years????????????? electric chair!
greg asks how the two of them met and stacy said she doesn’t actually know seandee and this is only the second time she’s ever seen her in her life. stacy says that she only became aware of her five years ago when seandee called the state board on her for doing hair at her home and they were both called in for a meeting with the authorities. greg asks stacy if she ever found out how seandee became familiar with her work (hehehe) and she says “social media.” oh no. i am dreading the rest of this story in advance because i know this is gonna be one of those instances in which my latent fears about the horrors of being online get triggered and my fight or flight is gonna kick in, forcing me to do something weird like delete all my grid posts or arbitrarily unfollow every third person in my timeline.
stacy says that she’s never seen seandee as a client, but seandee is notorious for looking up good hairstylists in their area online then constantly targeting them in an effort to hurt their business. that’s fucking insane??? but then stacy continues, saying that seandee is a fucking hairstylist and wow okay phew this is just professional rivalry hating thank god, not some new iteration of customer service torment. stacy explains that she moved to vegas in 2013 and a year later discovered seandee was posting pictures of stacy and her husband with rude hashtags about their looks and their work. it’s worth noting that in the witness chair behind her stacy’s man’s braids (say that three times fast) are clean as a damn whistle and twinkling under the lights, my goodness!!! anyway seandee also posted side-by-side pictures of herself and stacy trying to get people in the comments to judge them against each other. i’m sorry but does the better business bureau need to know she’s doing this weird shit? who is this lady, the inventor of facemash????
greg is incredulous and so am i. stacy says seandee never met her, never met her husband, never even sat in her chair and yet she posted upwards of 500 individual photos and negative reviews to stacy’s yelp account!!!!!!!!!! murder court is shut down for the day but you think maybe we can get into mental hospital court on such short notice?? i mean, damn! greg asks what seandee says “under the posts” (PLEASE) and stacy says she calls her fat and says her makeup looks casket ready and she posts pictures of the shop and pictures of stacy’s business license and i’m sorry but WHAT. what is this lady’s problem?
okay it’s seandee’s turn finally. she opens her mouth to speak and this is the scariest shit of all: she’s got the most pleasant, professional, responsible-aunt voice i have ever heard and you know when somebody sounds like this and also does emotional crimes??? you gotta get the fuck away from them immediately. seandee says that she is a licensed braider and when stacy moved to town she reached out to her on facebook asking seandee to send clients her way because they do two different styles of braids, which is a sentence i understand in theory but absolutely not in practice. seandee says that at the time she declined because stacy wasn’t licensed (i’m assuming this is because she had just moved and hadn’t gotten her license updated yet, but also what’s the harm in sending a client to a stylist who does a thing you don’t??) and didn’t know her. seandee says stacy reached out two years later, again asking for a referral since she’d gotten her license instated, and again seandee refused, but this time because she says stacy had been on social media calling her work ugly. i refuse to believe that!!!!!!!!!!!
stacy, who is an adorable little baby cherub, apparently started threatening seandee in her DMs and omg have i been bamboozled? did i allow my emotions to be swayed by cotton candy hair and delightfully chubby cheeks??? i guess so, because seandee has printed out text evidence™ of stacy telling her that her “ass whupping is due.” stacy starts to defend herself by saying that the text in question was prompted by seandee’s posting a picture of her little daughter online (guillotine, if true) but greg is already tired of this because, as we all know, he loathes a keyboard gangster.
i, on the other hand, absolutely do not. facebook auntie drama is the only good kind left, and nothing would thrill me more than for this lady to pull her reading glasses out and squint at the printed out comment threads i have no doubt are chilling in her accordion of truth™ right now. greg turns to stacy and asks whether or not she reached out to seandee first, and stacy says something like “not that i recall” and then greg loses his ever-loving mind, demanding to know how you could bring a court case against someone for harassment when you’re not sure whether or not you’re the one who actually started it.
stacy stands firm in her lack of remembering, and the judge (annoyed, impatient) turns to seandee (smug, smelling a victory) and of fucking course she has printed-out facebook timelines™ to prove her side of the story!!!!!!!! greg demands that someone show him who reached out to whom first, then there is a mad scramble to see who can find the oldest-dated incident in the inch-thick stacks of printouts seandee and stacy have both brought with them to court. they’re gonna fuck around and get a paper cut trying to find a single sheet of paper with the year 2013 inked on it!!!!! seandee whips out an email from 2015 and when greg starts reading aloud messages about nasty DMs and blocking people i age twenty years in an instant. he glances up at seandee and says “you’re fifty years old (RUDE) and out here talking about ‘blocking’ people???” THE ANSWER IS YES, JUDGE MATHIS. YES, WE ARE WEARING OUR COMPRESSION HOSE AND BLOCKING PEOPLE.
the ruling: stacy says she has proof that seandee’s harassment began before her counter-harassment did and she hands the judge an email from december 2015, four months after the proof that seandee showed him. stacy’s defense is that seandee had already been posting about her publicly before she initiated DM contact. greg turns to seandee, face dripping with disapproval, and says “is that true?” and seandee admits that yes, she’d been talking greasy about stacy’s skills before stacy jumped in her inbox. goddamn this is a lot of effort!!!!!!! i thought putting in braids took a minimum of 47 hours??? how does she have the time (or scaphoid durability, tbh) for all this nonsense????????
seandee says the reason she started posting about stacy is because stacy wouldn’t stop talking about her (i’m getting stupider by the second) and greg finally snaps, “ma’am, YOU should’ve stopped! you’re fifty years old and she’s a CHILD!” he says that fighting on the internet is young people’s shit and she’s too grown for that and seandee looks chastened and yeah that’s how i’d look too if i got caught appropriating young people’s culture and being embarrassing online. greg yells at seandee that she should’ve told stacy to stop behaving like a little girl online and squashed the beef before it escalated. judgment for no one, excpet maybe mark zuckerberg i guess!!
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “this sounds just like……….what’s the name of that movie, doyle? dangerous white woman????”