plaintiff: chris and james from grandview, missouri. okay these gentlemen look like they just walked out of structure in lincolnwood mall circa 1997: the one on the left (idk who is who yet) is wearing a maroon button down with a maroon paisley tie, and the one on the right has, like, a wide mohawk? i don’t know what to call it but it’s definitely a hairstyle. plus he has sculpted facial hair, and he’s wearing a dark teal shirt with a neon cotton candy pink tie under a black sportcoat. his shirt has the largest cuffs i have ever seen, so large that they fold back over the wrists of the sportcoat! i think i might be in love with these guys. i can hear “torn” by natalie imbruglia playing in the sam goody of my heart and am literally tasting the warm auntie anne’s pretzel turning into salty glue on my tongue. give them however much money will fit in the back of the iroc-z they drove to the studio.
defendant: josie from olathe, kansas. josie is very pretty, with long blonde waves of synthetic barbie hair doll cascading around her face. she’s tall and dressed in all black and is carrying an accordion of truth™ the size of a child.
the complaint: chris and james are business partners and are suing josie, a former employee, for defamation and breach of contract. however, josie says that one of the plaintiffs already had a bad reputation and that one of them had an affair with another employee and was hiring sex workers on the side.
what do they want: $3000 for defamation and breach of contract! countersuit: miss josie would like $3000 of her own for defamation and unpaid bonuses. i wonder, do you get to hear the amount that you’re being sued for before you get to decide how much you want to sue for in return? because if you sued me i would just countersue for the same amount and hope that i could make enough of a case that maybe we’d cancel each other out? even if i didn’t have a case i’d be like “he wants $1700? okay, well, he did $1700 worth of slander to me i guess i’ll see his bitch ass in court!”
how it went down: chris and james own a salon and i’m sorry but i cannot finish this recap because my heart just EXPLODED FROM JOY. these guys? own a hair salon?? this is my favorite thing i have ever seen! apparently they both owned separate salons but were having trouble individually, so they decided to pool their resources and go into business together. oh my god, this is incredible. i saw “business partners” and assumed “used car salesmen,” i never would have guessed in a million years that “doing nice midwestern ladies’ hair” is where we were gonna end up, wow. anyway when james first came into the salon (i assume he joined chris’s?) he said that organizing the state board of sanitation requirements was at the top of his list and he noticed that josie had not taken care of many of the infractions. he says she also hired an unlicensed assistant. josie looks fucking shocked. real, unbridled (yet low stakes) shock on a human face is so funny.
after the confrontation over the unlicensed worker, james says josie turned her nastiness on him, being rude to him at work and spreading rumors about his old salon. i feel like i need to point out, again, that these dudes look like they should be taking you into a power washer you don’t need at lowe’s, not fighting a lady in court over petty salon gossip. i can’t get over it. james says that josie eventually inspired a “mutiny,” convincing other employees to quit en masse. uhhh, what? i’m sorry but if your entire workforce quits at once, bro? you are a shitty boss. if you are working a thankless customer service gig chances are you fucking need that thankless customer service gig, and nobody who needs a job quits that job because a pretty lady with bad extensions told them to. they quit that shit because it sucked.
josie says that when she started working with him it was painfully obvious that chris did not know how to run a salon. he brought james in to help and josie only worked with him for a couple of weeks. she says that she never got a state board violation, and that there were no huge issues until he hired this one girl who would get drunk and be disruptive in the salon, which james allowed because he was having an affair with her. judge mathis asks her how she knows all that and she says she has written proof of everything that is coming out of her mouth. james looks stricken and i understand why. i don’t want you to read my goddamn grocery list on tv, let alone all the weird shit i might be saying to someone i was sneaking around with??? lucky for me all my sexts are like “would you like to lie next to each other without touching and talk about john wick” which doesn’t really prove anything other than extreme inertia.
josie continues that during a company wide meeting the stylist chris was having an affair with (i’m sorry, earlier i thought she was talking about james because chris literally has not moved or said a word in his own defense in ten real minutes) showed them all proof that not only were they having an affair but also chris was hiring women for sex, which josie believes was an attempt at using/extorting him? i’m not an expert at crime, but isn’t the point of extortion that you don’t tell? but you threaten to? anyway josie says that when they caught wind that james (who is so smarmy, my goodness) was going to merge with their existing salon in addition to all this drama with the stylist, there was an uproar among the staff because james has a horrible reputation in the industry and has had three previous salons shut down. josie says he used to host sex parties in his old salon, and the camera pans out to show that she has spread approximately 4,726 sheets of paper across her lectern. she holds several of them up to show the judge proof of these sex parties printed off james’s facebook page, and i’m not gonna lie i looked away because i’m a virgin and i hate seeing sin!
apparently james’s stylists often wear sexy, see-through clothes to work and are generally gross and lewd and sexual harass-y, and josie said neither she nor her clients wanted to be associated with that type of environment. the salon was next to a frozen yogurt shop for goodness sake! wholesome families love frozen yogurt! so she quit before james could tarnish her reputation.
the ruling: james says that their stylist contract is a lease-rent (is that an actual term? i refuse to look it up) and that josie left with two months remaining on her contract. the defamation claim is because she went on facebook and said that chris and james had stolen her clients while warning potential new stylists that they had bad business ethics. josie says she doesn’t owe the rent because she told the manager that she didn’t want to sign the contract james is referring to. she amended the contract, which they both signed, and josie claims james breached it because her amendment was that he couldn’t raise the rent and he raised it four fucking times. in a year? damn! but greg isn’t hearing that because she signed the contract, even though she amended it and he signed her changed copy? and she says that the defamation claim isn’t valid because all the shit she said was true, but greg just steamrolls past all that. i love the judge but something is off here. should i go to law school?
josie has too many papers and statements and a recording and a star witness and none of this seems to make a bit of difference to the judge because he says that she keeps contradicting herself with her explanations, so he dismisses her case. listen, i am a moron but other than talking too fast and overwhelming gregory with evidence, i’m not sure josie was in the wrong here? what fair trial rights do you waive to have your case on this fucking show? anyway, judgment inexplicably for the plaintiffs, which maybe they will use to start a richard marx cover band or something.
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: greg: “are you calling this woman a nasty fraud?!” james: “she was very unclean.” greg: “call it like it is, say the woman is nasty!”
*bangs gavel*