babies, we did it. happy 50th anniversary.
plaintiff: letavia from bourbonnais, illinois. white dressy t-shirt (you know what i mean? like, your nice white shirt that’s a lil thicker than the other girls and can pass in church or court despite being comfortable as fuck?) tucked into a dark teal pencil skirt. waist: snatched. hair: flowing. accordion of truth™: clutched.
defendant: leetrelle from bourbonnais, illinois. he looks almost too young to be getting sued? i can see the baby-softness of his skin through the tv, even though judge mathis doesn’t air on a hi def channel here! leetrelle has a hightop fade, a beginner mustache, and is definitely wearing the same shirt he wore to his high school graduation two weeks ago.
the complaint: letavia is suing her brother leetrelle for totaling her car, and i’ll spare you my rant about trusting your siblings with your prized possessions but please know I AM THINKING IT.
what does she want: $1800 for damages
how it went down: letavia starts off with a very compelling after school special speech about how growing up she didn’t want leetrelle to be afraid to be different, and she wanted him to know that he should be held accountable for his actions and that he shouldn’t feel pressured to be like the rest of his naughty siblings. she just wants him to live up to his potential! uh ohhhh, you can tell greg is already dusting off his dad jeans and sharpening up his tough guy anecdotes, he absolutely lives and breathes for the opportunity to lecture a disadvantaged youth! letavia says leetrelle was the first of the four boys in their family to graduate high school, and since she is the oldest of the seven total children she tried her best to help him.
for a while all the kids were raised by their grandparents, but when the rest of the kids moved back in with mom and dad leetrelle stayed behind with grandma and grandpa, and letavia says this caused him to have “only child syndrome.” she said he was bossy, rude, arrogant, and had a smart mouth. i had to wipe the screen down to make sure my sister jane hadn’t snuck on my tv, because if you called her right now on her bluetooth headset that she refuses to take off even at the dinner table, this is exactly how she’d describe me. also “spoiled.” before we continue let me just interject, on the behalf of all youngest siblings everywhere, that letavia’s speech just sounds like all bitter older siblings sound when they talk about us, the babies, the apples of our parents’ eye. look i’m sorry mom was mean to you and experimented with different cruel parenting styles on you, and it is truly not my fault that by the time i sprung fully formed from father’s brow that he’d reached his mellow “ice cream for dinner” years! we’re so sorry they loved us more!!! anyway, letavia and leetrelle became close over the years and, despite some class clowning in his alternative school for which she had to discipline him, he graduated. i am too nervous to ask where the parents were? but whatever!
leetrelle says that he and letavia were indeed the closest out of all the siblings and he says she saw more in him than he saw in himself. man, i hate when i accidentally watch one of these heartfelt cases. this is what happens when i watch the episodes on the dvr instead of clicking straight on the mess on youtube. i press play, start typing, and then BAM i’m blindsided by a sad couple wistfully bemoaning their shared history or whatever this “my sister was my biggest champion” shit is gonna turn out to be. i mean, i love it yay families, but it’s hard to make fun of. ah well, we take the good with the bad i guess but i’m fast forwarding this!
letavia says that she and leetrelle had an agreement that he could use her extra car if he agreed to take her daughter back and forth to daycare while she worked and went to school, because she was so proud of him for graduating. man, letavia is a fucking saint! going to night school, raising a kid, and believing in her brother??? couldn’t be me! the only stipulation was that he needed to 1 have a license and 2 pay for insurance. leetrelle told her that instead of getting insurance he could just pay for any damage he incurred because he had a job, which is so stupid, and she told him no he had to get the car insured. everything was fine and working out great for everybody until one day leetrelle just stopped picking her daughter up, and shortly after that he got into a car accident. leetrelle assured letavia that he was going to take care of the totaled (uninsured, apparently) car, but “weeks and then months” went by and he did not.
the ruling: leetrelle says that he feels like he shouldn’t owe letavia any money on the car because the accident wasn’t his fault, nor is it his responsibility that the other driver was also uninsured. maybe he really is seventeen, because this is the black and white logic of a child. i wish i had learned real world financial shit in high school, that there was an elective called “how not to fuck up your credit” or “this is how insurance works in case your broke ass ever totals your friend’s ride.” theoretically? of course you shouldn’t have to pay for someone else’s mistake! but this is the real world, where the insurance you dutifully pay for in case some dumb shit happens can cover the cost of whatever dumb shit just fucking happened. i got pulled over once with no insurance while driving someone else’s car and had to spend three goddamn years paying for an SR-22 even though i was riding the fucking bus. imagine the indignity! this is a hacky old man thing to say but goddamn if we could just divert half the time we spent in school on fractions to something useful like “retirement funds” or “how to file quarterly taxes” a lot of us would be much better off.
anyway leetrelle is scheduled to go to court in two days to fight the person who hit him and was listed as the cause of the accident. ALRIGHT, LEETRELLE. but greg doesn’t care about that, he wants to know if leetrelle ever promised to get insurance. leetrelle says no, he only promised to pay out of pocket to fix the car if anything happened to it. greg doesn’t buy it, because he believes letavia wouldn’t have given him the car if he hadn’t agreed to insure it. once again, the older sibling wins simply by virtue of being older. *pouts childishly*
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: to leetrelle, who says he’s going to get paid from his lawsuit against the woman who hit him, “aight well cross your fingers and hope that you can get your money back from her, because you paying letavia.”
*bangs gavel*