who's on judge mathis today? #282

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

plaintiff: lisa from charlotte, north carolina. lisa is wearing my favorite kind of outfit that i can never pull off: the chic cropped denim jacket over a jaunty little top. every denim jacket i have bought has been made from fucking particleboard, just stiff and unwieldy and impossible to break in. i’d just be walking around like i still had the hanger in the back of my shit, so i stopped buying them because i hate looking like an asshole. but it’s a look i lustily drool over on other people who somehow manage to find baby soft denim that looks worn and easy, not like a kindergartener on picture day or a fucking kohl’s mannequin.

defendant: dwayne from columbus, ohio. dwayne looks exactly like marvin from love jones, the absolute worst character in one of my favorite movies of all time. marvin was so terrible that even way back before i had a firm grasp of what misandry is i was like “he should be vacuumed off the planet, right?” anyway, dwayne looks like his charming older twin brother (go with it) and i hope i am not too biased by his handsome face to give him a fair shake!

the complaint: lisa claims he ex-fiancé headbutted her (EXCUSE ME???????) and caused her teeth issues, so now she is suing for dental bills and the balance on a truck.

what does she want: $4765, almost the limit yet still not nearly enough!!

how it went down: lisa, who has a big, gorgeous smile like a ray of sunshine, tells greg that she loves his show and never forgets to tape an episode, and she says that no matter his ruling on this case she will still be a fan. i cannot relate to that, but admire it nonetheless. lisa continues, in the most earnest possible voice you can imagine, “i loved this man. i was going to marry this man.” dwayne rolls his eyes as if today is the first day he’s meeting lisa, and boy do i hate THAT. she says everything between them was “really good, until his crack addiction destroyed everything we had.”

lisa says that early in their relationship dwayne was really sweet. he would draw her bubble baths (this elicits a loud “oOOoOooOoh” from the studio audience, which is the exact opposite of my reaction: cringing as i imagine a beautiful adult lady sliding around trying to settle into a slightly too small regular person tub filled with slippery bath oils) and take her out to movies and nice dinners. things took a turn when, six months into their courtship, lisa says a “young lady he was cheating with” left a voicemail on his phone. greg says “oh, so you violated his privacy?” and lisa shrugs and says “welp, he gave me the code” and somebody get an ethicist on the horn and tell us who’s in the more-wrong here.

i know my lady’s passcode but also i don’t need to snoop because i already know what she’s doing on her phone: taking pictures of the sky and googling birds, entering appointments into the digital calendar i refuse to pay attention to, looking up the times for this week’s aqua zumba. and vice versa! i suppose if she ever wanted to know what godawful memes i’m laughing at or what nba reddit is mad about today she could unlock my shit and reconsider her life choices (the last thing i googled, post my harrowing psychiatry appointment on friday, was “hypervigilance of interoceptive cues” because she said i have that, and yes at the end of our session she bumped up my prozac dosage to 80mg/day), but who cares! if you’re checking your dude’s phone, it’s because you already know you’re gonna find somebody else’s naked [redacted] or [redacted] in there.

lisa says she confronted dwayne and they “did some wrasslin’ and tusslin’ in the yard” about it but stayed together (why???) despite his infidelity. she says several months later dwayne pulled a disappearing act and, because she was so in love with him (not a good enough reason???), lisa went out searching for him for days before finding him wandering around a speedway gas station smoking a black & mild. okay, we respect a man with TASTE. there’s a speedway not far from me that has clean pumps where the tap your card function is always working and they have the best snacks of all of the regional gas station and i love going there, but the one bad part is there’s this one (very nice) guy behind the register who always shouts out your purchases when you’re in his line????? i frequent the gas station for anonymous chips, please do not yell out “GIRL, YOU GOT THE ZAPP’S CAJUN DILL GATOR-TATORS” he says the entire name every single time, it is mortifying “AGAIN? YOU MUST LOVE THOSE, I HEARD THEY’RE GOOD” and, okay, first of all, brian, they are good. maybe you should walk over by the hotdogs and grab a bag. second, is there a way for me to purchase my shit without all of the American Patriots™ in here getting big gulps staring at me down the barrels of their guns like i’m stealing???? although maybe i should count my blessings because once i was there when he called this old man buying a reheated slice of pepperoni “MISTER PIZZA!!!!!!!” and if he ever refers to me as “misses chips” i will have no choice but to die by my own hand.

greg wants to know (DUH) when lisa caught dwayne smoking crack, and she says that actually her daughter found a crack pipe in his clothes when she was doing his laundry, which is why you should always separate your own white (rocks) from your darks! it’s worth mentioning that dwayne doesn’t look like he’s on drugs today, he’s wearing a crisp blue dress shirt with a patterned tie and a freaking pocket protector with pens in it (!!!!!) which makes me think he googled “how to look respectable in court” because where do you even buy one of those???

dwayne says his relationship with lisa was great and as it deepened she revealed to him that she’d been in abusive relationships in the past. “i’m not a hitter” dwayne says, and if you feel like you have to say that unprompted about yourself all i hear is “i prefer to kick, or punch.” he says that the night lisa discovered the incriminating voicemail on his phone he was asleep and she slapped him awake (not cool) so he woke up and headbutted her. “i’m not a hitter” yeah okay but “i’m a headbutter” is markedly worse????? i’m not a masochist but i have been hit before, and if i had to choose i’d take an open-palmed smack across the chops over someone’s thinly-coated rock hard human skull battering rammed into my body any day of the week??? imagine being proud of “not hitting” when your chosen alternative is “kurt angle-style skull to skull contact.” I AM IN AWE (the bad kind).

now greg is mad. he asks dwayne if he’s “a crackhead” and dwayne says no, he just has a problem with drugs and alcohol. the judge says “is one of them crack?” and when dwayne answers in the affirmative he screams “then you’re a crackhead!!!!!!” listen, no judgment over here, everyone knows how hard i ride for the people’s princess, but come on, brother. you knew what show you were coming on. greg mathis is like a crack cocaine-specific drug dog, just tell him the truth before he embarrasses us all!!!!

lisa says that dwayne met a young lady while he was in treatment and the judge goes absolutely apoplectic. “treatment?? YOU WERE IN TREATMENT???” you can’t lie about your level of drug use when you were voluntarily committed to a place to get sober, not in front of this dude! lisa continues, saying that when dwayne got out of rehab he moved in with the woman he met there (oh noooo) but she was still in love with him so when he hit her up three months later trying to come back home she let him. dwayne might be addicted to crack but lisa is clearly fiending for the pipe?????? no dick on earth is this good; not even xavier thicc, and he has the best hips in porn. no man has “move back in after i fucked my ten step situationship” penis. i’m so sorry to break it to you but i’m right!

lisa says she stipulated that dwayne “couldn’t come home as long as he was with this young lady” which sounds……………….correct? who gets to live like this, just kicking it smoking blunts at the gas station and living with new women while lying to the old one who still loves you, what is so special about this man that at least two different babes are letting him clown them? is it because his hair has a little wave in it and his goatee is sharp??? he’s wearing a pocket protector!!!!!!!!

lisa says that dwayne was pissed about the no sidepiece rule and decided that he was going to come to her house to pick up his things and leave her for good, and she says that on his way out the door he headbutted her and broke her fucking teeth. more nerve than a toothache, this guy. remember earlier when he said she’d slapped him awake? i’m not condoning it (maybe) but i do know he didn’t say that he headbutted her several days after the fact. i feel like the statute of limitations on slap retaliation is, what, thirty-seven seconds??? go away from me with this!!!!

the ruling: dwayne admits to “headbutting lisa out of anger” and the judge tells him he’s gonna pay for that headbutt, but what’s all this about a truck? lisa says that when dwayne got out of rehab he got a job and needed a car to get back and forth to work. she says she agreed to help him get a vehicle as long as he passed a drug test. he did, so she cosigned on a loan for him. lisa says within two months dwayne was “back other there in the streets” and missed several truck payments.

dwayne vehemently denies this version of events, saying that the truck was repossessed for almost a year, and there’s no way he would’ve had it that long if he hadn’t been making the payments on it. the judge says “it got repossessed? why?” and dwayne, who maybe should’ve settled this out of court, says “because i stopped paying for it.” greg’s eyes nearly pop out of his head as he declares judgment for the plaintiff, then says “you tried to rise up on me like you were something other than a crackhead, but crackheads don’t rise up on me: they get cracked!”

did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “yes you are a hitter, you hit that pipe!!”

*bangs gavel*