who's on judge mathis today? #281

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

plaintiff: tresla from beverly hills, california. tresla confidently strolls into the courtroom looking BREATHTAKING in a sharp black pantsuit and crisp white blouse. it’s giving mogul, it’s giving corporate merger, it’s giving liquid assets and, frankly, it’s giving jackie brown executing the money exchange with melanie in the billingsley dressing room. one of the greatest scenes in one of the greatest movies of all time, imo. fingers crossed that before this case is over somebody shouts “shut your raggedy ass up and sit the fuck down!”

defendant: trenelle from sherman oaks, california. trenelle is gorge, too! she comes into the courtroom wearing a fitted black cocktail dress that has a little capelet type thing up top and a shiny satin bow dead in the middle of her waist. her brown hair is all swept to the left side, including an enormous bayang that half-obscures her left eye. her big hoop earrings have little africas hanging off them and brb i’m going to the spring of 1990.

the complaint: tresla and trenelle (i’d name twins that) both dated the same man, and trenelle has two kids with him. tresla says trenelle needed money, so tresla took out a title loan on her car (fingers crossed it’s a tesla) to help trenelle out. she hasn’t paid that money back, so now tresla is suing for the balance on a car loan!

what does she want: $3075! in turn, trenelle would like $2500 for harassment!

how it went down: okay, the way she tells this is a little disjointed, but tresla basically says that her boyfriend tareef, who is the wu-tang clan’s manager, asked her to meet up with trenelle to verify that the children trenelle claimed had been fathered by tareef were actually his. i’m sorry but does that……………………..pantsuit double as a lab coat??? does tresla just walk around with cheek swabs on her person???? omg men have GOT to fucking chill.

tresla says she met trenelle and her kids and determined that the twins were, in fact, tareef’s. i am flabbergasted! i look like my dad got glasses and shaved his hair off, so i understand an uncanny resemblance, but if figuring out paternity was so easy your regular-ass girlfriend could do it maury povich would’ve been out of business a long time ago! and since when do men just believe women? is she like neo, when she looks at a person can she see right through their skin straight to the DNA sequencing which is why he just took her word for it?? why isn’t the whole damn case about THIS???

tresla says when she met trenelle her twins were four years old and, in the subsequent twelve years, the two women have become “close like sisters.” okay, sure! if my sister had children by a dude i was kicking it with it might, oh i dunno, make thanksgiving a little awkward?? but if they like it, i love it. she says trenelle’s twins consider her their stepmother, which could be actually pretty great or totally fucking terrible but she doesn’t elaborate. trenelle says that she wasn’t raised by her biological mom but had a “fantastic” stepmom, and because of that she was totally open to tresla having an active role in her children’s lives. she says that her friendship with tresla was great, until the day tresla decided to sue her.

tresla says a few years ago trenelle received a three-day eviction notice and, after exhausting all of her available resources, approached trelsa about lending her the money she needed to keep her place. first of all, why is this her problem: WHERE’S DUDE?? okay anyway, tresla went to one of those places where you can get a cash loan in exchange for your car title and loaned trenelle $3000. that is extremely kind! tresla says she was comfortable doing so because trenelle’s father had just died and she was expecting some inheritance money. tresla says that the loan accrued high interest every day and yeah okay i guess this car title business is just a regular old predatory scam. i don’t have the sociology degree required to speak eloquently about this so let me just say it the dumb way: the way this system treats poor people, especially desperate poor people, is fucking criminal. 15.5% every single fucking day?? on a micro loan???? like whompst can we send the fuck to jail?????????

after two years of nonpayment tresla got trenelle to sign a promissory note in front of a notary and omg is she not only a part-time geneticist but a juris doctor as well????? dang, she’s professional! trenelle jumps in to say that she did pay not only the loan but also part of tresla’s car insurance every month for those two years, and i wonder if what she was paying was actually the interest and none of the principle? trenelle was paying $329/mo plus whatever the insurance portion was, over the course of two years, which means she paid a minimum of $7896 for a $3000 loan. sickening. when i was in the eighth grade my mom got me a bedroom set from rent-a-center and i remember coming home one day to find my mattress on the floor and all the shit that had been in my dresser piled in the corner where the dresser used to be because she’d gotten behind on the payments and the next best solution was “fuck it,” and yeah it sucked sitting on the floor to watch the “all i do is think of you” music video that i paid $2.50 for on the box, but it would’ve been ten times worse watching my mom scrape together $19.99 a week from her disability check for 200 fucking weeks!!!

trenelle says that tresla told her to send her tax refund payment to tresla’s account and she did. i gotta say, this doesn’t sound like a woman who doesn’t want to pay her debt? pretty sure this is more money than any previous litigant on this show has ever paid without a court ordering them to do so?? okay this gets confusing and math is not more forte so i’m not even gonna try: basically trenelle says that she paid every month, her tax return was supposed to take a big chunk of the interest, tresla applied some of trenelle’s tax return money toward the loan but not all of it because she spent $800 on “emergencies,” then trenelle says tresla told her she could take a break on paying the loan back and she did. i’m mad this even happened, doesn’t cash rule everything around us??? where’s baby daddy with the dolla dolla bills, y’all???

the ruling: trenelle brings up a witness, kimberly, and she begins by holding up a copy of greg’s book inner city miracle and telling him how much it helped her while raising her son. she is me, except i’d be holding up a copy of some dumb shit i wrote, telling him how much it would improve his life. kimberly says that trenelle called her when she found out tresla hadn’t put all of her tax return money on the loan and she was very upset and told her that tresla had said she wouldn’t have to pay anymore. i’m no legal scholar but i am an expert in courtroom shows, and i believe this qualifies as hearsay!! greg agrees, and politely dismisses kimberly back to the rickety folding chair they bring out for +1s to sit on.

okay we’re finally getting down to it. greg asks trenelle what she thinks she owes tresla, and trenelle says that at the time her money was electronically deposited straight into tresla’s account, the balance due was $3000 (god, that really for real means that she spent two years paying the interest i’m going to scream) and if she’d applied all 2800 of those dollars to the loan she’d only owe a measly two hundred bucks, which it takes her a little too long to say but come on i couldn’t perform simple mathematics in front of a television camera either. the judge becomes inexplicably angry as she trips over her words (sometimes when these cases take too long you can see his blood sugar dropping, someone get this man a granola bar!) and demands to know what trenelle’s countersuit is for.

trenelle says that tresla came up to her job to fight her (this classy lady?? in the l.a. law opening argument fit???) and also called all of her friends to talk about the money she owed her. tresla says she didn’t go into trenelle’s job, she called to threaten her from the parking lot, and the judge says that isn’t harassment and dismisses the countersuit. and because trenelle took longer than a millisecond to subtract 2800 from 3000 in her head and annoyed him, to tresla goes the TRIUMPH.

did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “oh, good! you’re like wife-in-laws!”

*bangs gavel*