plaintiff: eddie from los angeles, california. grey shirt, pained expression, very busy necktie.
defendant: jonathan from glendale, california. black sweater, carefully coiffed hair, extreme cokehead energy.
the complaint: jonathan dated eddie’s sister-in-law and inexplicably messed up eddie’s car.
what does he want: $3656 for a vandalized car. countersuit is in the building: jonathan wants $1646 for a smashed window. they both promise to introduce video evidence, which is either real great or real fucking terrible.
how it went down: eddie starts by saying he knows jonathan through his sister-in-law because they used to date, and he’s been an asshole to her so they’ve often bumped heads. i’m already perplexed because my immediate thought was “wow you have bigger problems than a car if you had to drag your brother’s wife’s boyfriend on daytime tv” but please know that i 1 am operating under a foggy cloud of cold medicine and cannot actually think and 2 do not fully understand the myriad number of ways in which people can be related to one another. it took a good three minutes of staring at the paused image on my television screen for it to work its way into my brain that eddie’s wife must have a sister who dated the defendant. tylenol sinus severe daytime caplets for non-drowsy symptom relief? do better!
eddie says that jonathan is an alcoholic who is always arguing with his sister-in-law. boy i hope he hurries up and says that woman’s fucking name because trying to type fast and coherently while inserting all these dashes is gonna mess my shit up quick. eddie is pretty tight-lipped, which is an interesting strategy for a person currently on a television show to employ, and greg is visibly irritated.
he turns to jonathan for a little pizzazz, and boy o boy does he deliver, telling the court that eddie is a real scary dude, a former METH COOK and GANG MEMBER who HATES HIM and once KICKED HIS DOG. jackpot! jonathan has even received anonymous death threats, which he believes have come from eddie and his gang friends, too. now we’re cooking with grease! jonathan pulls the printed out death threats (can you even believe this fucking show is free) from his accordion of truth™ and gives them to judge mathis to read. “eddie’s gonna kill you if you don’t give him back that three thousand,” reads the first one and listen, don’t judge a book etc etc, but the way eddie is standing stone faced while these threats are being attributed to him? oh yeah, bitch: he sent that shit.
okay so finally at this point greg yells at jonathan to stop shaking and jittering and asks eddie to fill him in on the particulars of the case. eddie says that jonathan came over to his house and accused him of scratching his car, which he had nothing to do with. he also sent messages to his wife, which eddie has courteously printed out to share with the rest of the class. the texts to his wife are so bad that the judge can’t even read them aloud! now wait a minute, if i was terrified that the friendly cartel kingpin next door was going to kill me, would i really be texting a bunch of cuss words to his old lady? you know greg’s not even having a little bit of that shit, and says if somebody called his wife all these names he’d beat his ass. (or maybe smash his car window?)
the ruling: now for the video evidence. jonathan brought his dog over to eddie’s house to attack him, according to eddie, and the entire encounter is caught on the grainiest surveillance footage i have ever seen in my life. is this legally admissible? how can greg base an accurate verdict on a blue human-shaped blob walking a vaguely dog-shaped blob who has a confrontation across the street from wherever the camera is mounted with a smaller man-sized shadow-blob who possibly cooks meth? WHAT THE FUCK AM I EVEN LOOKING AT. in the next video, which is a little clearer, we see jonathan first keying eddie’s car and then coming back to kick it. this is really fucking quaint! remember the olden days when people got mad at you and just punched your car or left dog shit on your porch? that was so sweet and manageable. nowadays you piss a bitch off and she cybercrimes your whole future away!
jonathan tries to argue that the video was taken during the day and the damage to the car occurred at night, but...we see him kick-punch the car door? like with our eyes, we just watched this asshole damage eddie’s car. “do you get high?” judge mathis asks at this point and listen y’all, i need to guest host. i called this shit at the beginning! jonathan then proceeds to admit to causing the damage, but says the damage he inflicted occurred at night. so...he did double damage? and it’s actually worse?! what is happening here.
oh my god after all this there’s still the fucking counterclaim! jonathan hands the judge a transcript to accompany a video of him chasing eddie down the street while swearing at him. the video is so shaky it’s making me sick, like seeing blair witch all over again, and i wish this dude would chill on the methamphetamines. at the end of the video eddie pulls a myles garrett (sorry i like sports!) and smashes jonathan’s car window with a motorcycle helmet, but this is after dude has been chasing him around with this wobbly ass camera cussing him out so much that all of the dialogue is one sustained beep and trying to provoke him to do exactly this. i’m not saying it’s right but i’m not not saying it’s right. they both get their judgments granted because all this bad behavior was caught on videotape, and i’m gonna look online for home security systems because wow it obviously comes in handy.
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: after the first video, which ends with jonathan running away from eddie even though he showed up at dude’s crib trying to scare him with a goddamn dog, greg says, “man, why did you run away? you’re the one with the pitbull!”
*bangs gavel*