who's on judge mathis today? #280

an idiotic recap of the greatest syndicated courtroom show of all time

plaintiff: latosa from atlanta, georgia. when i worked at bramer we had a pile of community scrubs in the breakroom closet that you could borrow if, say, a fractious cat vomited all over you or a nippy dog latched onto your leg and ripped your pants, and it was the most random assortment of disparate bullshit from hell you’ve ever seen in your life? like, hideous jewel-toned scrub jackets and garish low-slung flared scrub pants, and everyone who saw you the rest of the day knew you’d been covered in dirt or shit earlier because there’s no other reason you’d willingly be walking around in maroon tie-dyed scrub joggers! anyway, latosa walks in wearing a shocking neon green shift dress beneath a (try to picture this) neon royal blue cardigan and my kneejerk response when i saw her was oh nooo she got pissed on!!

defendant: wendy from st petersburg, florida. wendy is giving exhausted, wendy is giving exasperated, wendy is giving leave me the hell alone, wendy is giving i’m tired of this shit and i want to go home. auntie is annoyed, auntie’s feet hurt, auntie’s hip is bothering her in all this damn rain, and auntie is carrying the most overstuffed accordion of truth™ i have ever seen and i cannot wait to find out what’s in there.

the complaint: latosa agreed to publish wendys’s book but says she didn’t fulfill her end of the deal and then started badmouthing her, so now she’s suing for defamation.

what does she want: $4340!!! and it’s been a minute but glory be to god we’ve got a countersuit: wendy would like $3000 because latosa has been “emailing her too much.” wait, we can do that? i mean, legally speaking?? if she wins, ima see a lot of bitches i hate in a court of law!

how it went down: SPEAKING OF BOOKS????? ahem, okay now that we’ve gotten that bit of nastiness out of the way, latosa says “i’ve known ‘ma furse’ since i was eleven years old; she was my sunday school teacher, her son was my first boyfriend, and i spent summers at her house and lots of time with her family.” hold up, the bible doesn’t say anything about suing your sunday school teacher on midafternoon TV??? somebody tell king james it’s time for an eleventh commandment!

they lost touch after wendy’s son graduated high school and went into the military, but the two of them reconnected on facebook a couple years ago. latosa says she is “a publisher and [has] published twelve books [herself] at [her] publishing house.” latosa says that as they rekindled their friendship wendy confided in her that she was an abuse survivor and latosa decided to exploit that by urging her to publicly tell her story. wendy told her that she’d thought about writing a memoir multiple times, and latosa said that if wendy ever wrote and finished a book she would publish it. she says “but we’ve gone from me calling her mom and her saying i’m like a daughter to her now calling me a ‘skanky tramp’ and disparaging my name every chance she gets on social media.” i love this, i fiend for a lawsuit over facebook posts. gimme more!! i go on the computer to have fun and laff, but i am in awe of the chaos monsters who prefer to use it for silly shit like this!!

wendy begins her testimony saying part of what latosa is saying is the truth, that they did meet at church and latosa did come over to her house when she was a child, “but she left out the part that she is delusional.” BABE, I CHOKED. latosa interrupts to say that she worked “tirelessly” on wendy’s book, that she both designed the cover and did the layout, that’s how much she cared about her. latosa says their agreement was that she would publish wendy’s book for $250, a discount from her usual fee of $1000.

here’s where i’m going to finally un-bite my poor tongue and butt my nose in to tell you A REAL PUBLISHER WILL NEVER ASK YOU TO PAY TO PUBLISH YOUR BOOK. publishers make money by keeping a cut of the profits when the book is sold to consumers. if you choose not to go traditional and publish your book yourself that of course will cost you, BUT: if a vanity publisher is charging you money, please know they are charging you money you would otherwise just spend to do the work of self-publishing. you’d be their customer, and it’s lowkey predatory and they won’t get you readers or PR or distribution, but they aren’t gonna tell you that. if that’s the arrangement you want (“i’m too lazy to figure out self-publishing, here do it for me”) i respect it and that’s cool, i just want you to have an idea of what you’re getting yourself into. the original first edition of my (brilliant, outstanding) book meaty was published without an agent by an indie in chicago and while they were too small and bootstrapping to pay me an advance, nobody ever hit me up like “hey, you got anything on this jacket artwork i threw together in microsoft paint??” this is crazy.

latosa told wendy that she could use her social security money (i assume) to just take care of the cost of the ISBN and she would provide the rest, how kind! latosa says that wendy’s memoir was supposed to launch the nonfiction arm of her publishing empire. she produces a contract from her accordion of truth™ and the judge reads a highlighted portion in which latosa promises wendy that in exchange for a full manuscript she will provide her with a “publishing action plan.” okay, this is making me mad because what even is that!!!

latosa says that wendy turned in a handwritten manuscript (not surprising because this lady is OLD and she needs to be at CHURCH and then watching a tyler perry movie on her plastic-covered COUCH) and even though that’s not how she prefers to do business she not only helped her type it up, she also sent out press releases about its upcoming publication to local news organizations. hold up, does random house send my shit to the fucking news??? i bet they don’t! maybe i should pay them!!!!!!!

latosa says based on her press releases (god what did they say) a morning show reached out about having wendy on (GOD WHAT DID THEY SAY), and once that happened wendy “went hollywood and got all diva” and “didn’t want to listen to any of the rules and regulations in her contract.” she says that she has all of her authors sign an “author operations” contract that stipulates that they can’t do things like post nasty shit on facebook and you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. wendy has to buy her own ISBN and get latosa’s approval on the picture of her lunch she posts on social media??? greg is tired of this bullshit and cuts latosa off, asking her to get to what wendy did to end up owing her $4340 and i’d like to know as well because, according to this website, the most expensive ISBN option is a measly $129.

latosa says part of the money she wants recouped is from when she flew to florida three times to “help facilitate” wendy’s book. is that they typesetting fee? greg is like “why would you spend that money if it wasn’t part of your agreement?” and latosa says “because i loved her” and he immediately retorts “okay then, it was a gift.” greg then asks specifically what wendy breached and latosa says she defamed her online and, his impatience visibly growing, greg shouts “she breached a contract of two hundred and fifty dollars! i’m trying to see how you got that up to four thousand!!!!!” latosa says there was marketing and promotional costs also included in wendy’s contract but maybe she forgot she already said they’d agreed to $250? and even if she wasn’t offering her the “i dated your son” discount, she says her standard rate is a thousand dollars so babe what’s really going on!

latosa fights back (alright!!) and yells at the judge that the marketing and promotion agreement is separate from the one she gave him to review earlier. he catches an even worse attitude and demands she show him this additional supplemental contract, and she says that wendy did not agree to that one “in writing.” come on!!!!!!!!! you can’t be like “i’m a businesswoman” in one breath and in the next admit that you’re trying to get the court (lmao) to enforce a contract you didn’t even get signed??? please god, i would like to see even one of the informational pamphlets published by this company, pretty please!

the judge takes us all to law school and says that he legally can’t rule on a verbal contract latosa alleges took place after the written one that was signed and i, Fatticus Binch, completely agree. latosa is like “can we get to my harassment claim?” and you know what? let’s do that, because this……………….isn’t going great. latosa says since she cancelled her book, wendy has sent her one hundred and twenty-six emails. latosa gives greg a sampling of the emails to read and she highlighted the bad parts she doesn’t want to read aloud because despite the fact that wendy is over there looking all innocent she’s really an asshole.

“so you want me to say it out loud?” judge mathis asks and hell yeah we motherfucking do!! latosa gives him eleven of wendy’s “greatest hits” and when he asks wendy if she really emailed that many times she says she sure did but they were all in response to harassing emails latosa had sent her. she says she’s the one who had to ask latosa to stop sending emails (i would bet my next $42 royalty check that these emails are courtesy of yahoo.com) so if anyone she be suing for harassment it’s her!

greg asks latosa if she ever emailed wendy after she’d asked her to stop and she says she didn’t and boy the kinko’s in st petersburg must’ve been hopping because wendy pulls out a thick stack of paperwork and on the top is an email dated april 25 in which wendy says their deal is done and latosa has no need to message her again and stapled to that email???? one from latosa dated april 26!!!!! PARTY TIME, BOO.

the ruling: well it’s about to be over for miss latosa but she doesn’t seem to realize it yet, asking greg “what did it say?” and he tells her it doesn’t matter what it says because it was sent after wendy said not to. “you told me you never emailed her again, you said it emphatically! why did you lie?” latosa tries to pivot and asks what email address it was sent from but the judge cuts her off mere milliseconds before she can say “@ hotmail dot com” (i know this in my heart) and says to wendy “now how did you get to $3000 for your $250 book??????” harsh!

wendy says that latosa published the book anyway (excuse me) and did a shitty job of it, to boot. she says that on her dedication page the name “michael jackson” is misspelled (please) and that there’s a minimum of twenty-five errors on each page throughout the book (i would die to read this) and even though she’d sent her a galley when she’d tried to alert latosa to the errors she refused to listen to her because she “had experts going over them.” the judge asks if latosa had sent a corrected galley (there should have been a marked up manuscript and then galleys, but i’m honestly shocked she didn’t just send barnes & noble a bunch of stapled together pages from a dot matrix printer so i’m gonna let her cook) and wendy says no, then she holds up a handful of papers with green post-its sticking out and says that’s the galley she sent her and uh ohhh i’m getting mad again!

wendy says she’s holding the original galley and that she never received a corrected one, and when the judge asks latosa if that’s true she says she sent her “an electronic version,” but come on girl not five minutes ago you told us she messengered you her original manuscript written longhand on legal pads delivered by a footman on a horse! as soon as i (young-ish, relatively computer literate) receive my .doc with maria’s notes and copyediting corrections/suggestions in the margin (“i don’t think this joke is hitting the way you intend it to” is a real correction i got) for editing, i break out in a full sweat and have to helplessly youtube search “how to use track changes in microsoft word” literally every single time! and i’m four books, a time magazine cover story, and several NYT op-eds in!!! she knows this old lady can’t figure that complicated shit out!!!! she’d be better off giving a dog a bicycle!!!!!

greg asks why she didn’t just print her a copy and latosa says she’d already printed one for her and wasn’t going to print another, and he turns to wendy and says “let’s go on ahead and get you your money back.” both emotional distress claims are dismissed and the judge grants wendy her $250 back, and now i’m on my way to the bookstore to see if i can find the best book written in illegible cursive on the back of a takeout menu to ever exist.

did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “ma’am, the title of your book is ‘what makes you fat?’ most people want to read books about how to lose weight!” (no sir, not over here! in this house we read kate manne and aubrey gordon!!!)

*bangs gavel*