who's on judge mathis today? #300

plaintiff: rachaundra from springfield, illinois. springfield is the state capitol, as every eighth grader who was forced into a fieldtrip to rub abraham lincoln’s golden nose is well aware. rachaundra glides into the courtroom in a black cowl shirts, the kind where the cowl is so loose from a distance it looks like a v-neck? jail. put them in the same cell as boatnecks and cold shoulders! rachaundra has a fresh white manicure, glittering diamonds in her ears, and hair that can only be described as: bayangg.

defendant: ebonie from springfield, illinois. ebonie is serving director of the children’s choir at mount zion ame church realness in a soft 80s pantsuit (remember those? like, an electric teal, super floppy, too-big feminine suit? god, take me back) over a gorgeous silk shell covered in an eyewateringly-bright auntie print.

the complaint: rachaundra says she and ebonie got into a fight, and ebonie tried hitting rachaundra with her car, so now she is suing!

what does she want: $4491 countersuit filed! ebonie would like $2864 for car damages, which is the funniest thing i’ve ever heard in my life. imagine the tememrity to drive your car at someone and then sue them for the damage to your car? what did rachaundra do, get too much blood and brain on it???

how it went down: rachaundra says that she met ebonie back in 2010, when she started dating [ebonie’s] child’s father. okay, the human bumper cars of it all is beginning to make more sense knowing that. rachaundra said there were no issues between them until ebonie tried to get back with dude a few years later. at the same time he got incarcerated (they haven’t said his name!), ebonie started “going around town telling people” and posting on social media that she and the young man in question were sleeping together.

who are you guys friends with on instagram? i follow too many people but thankfully my algorithm mostly shows me the meme pages i like, but i don’t know that i’d need to follow my man’s ex? everyone should be cool, because kids don’t deserve to live in uncool circumstances of their parents’ creation, but does that extend to what bitch’s tweets you look at?? how did they even get to that point???

ebonie says that not only has she never posted about messing around with her child’s father online, but clarifies that she in fact does not want him back, thank you very much. ebonie says that their conflict stems from rachaundra’s jealousy of her easygoing relationship with (let’s name him something fun that is absolutely not his name) bob, and that they haven’t been romantic with each other in ages, they’re just good coparents. greg asks rachaundra if she has any proof of bob’s cheating and, if so, what happened when she asked him about it. that’s right, gregory devonte mathis says WOMEN’S RIGHTS. rachaundra says the proof she found was text messages from ebonie to bob, and that when rachaundra confronted him about them, he went and confronted ebonie. okay then!

ebonie contends that not of this is true, that rachaundra is the one who is harassing her. ebonie says that at one point rachaundra would wake up every morning and immediately tag her in multiple nasty posts on facebook or instagram. that dedication to her wrath is admirable, especially for an amateur hater such as myself. i don’t think i even brush my teeth with that kind of frequency. rachaundra denies it, but luckily ebonie has several printed out status update sheets™ tucked into her accordion of truth™. the judge reads them out loud but they’re heavily bleeped and the camera isn’t on his face, but in one of them rachaundra warns the men of springfield to be careful what kind of bitches they have kids with and tagged ebonie. she also tagged her in another in which she called her children ugly (do they not? share half their dna?? with your man???) and another where she just typed a bunch of fist emojis, also with her tagged. that last one is fucking funny. like a virtual “put up your dukes.” ol’ i’m gonna give you a knuckle sandwich ass.

rachaundra says that on halloween her boyfriend threw a get together at his father’s house, to which ebonie and her witness in court showed up uninvited. the boyfriend and his father asked them to leave, but they refused to do so quietly. ebonie says she had no idea that bob was even having a party, she was just there so that the witness (her cousin) could talk to her boyfriend, who was inside. when ebonie refused to leave the premises rachaundra stepped between ebonie and bob to confront her, and their ensuing argument “got physical for a couple of minutes.” a couple minutes is really a long fucking time if you count the seconds in punches. the built-in two-minute timer on my electric toothbrush feels interminable and all i’m doing is sitting there daydreaming, i cannot imagine spending that same amount of time repeatedly getting duffed over and over in my fucking face????

after someone broke the two of them apart ebonie pulled out a can of mace and maced rachaundra’s friend which, i’m sorry, makes me a little skeptical about her claim that she wasn’t interested in having a fight. rachaundra says that after she maced her friend, ebonie jumped into her car and attempted to hit rachaundra, and as she ducked behind her nearby parked car for safety, ebonie laid her foot on the gas and drove straight into it. this is the kind of person i am in my fantasies, zoned out in the middle of the night with my robot toothbrush: a woman who would see a bitch she hates on the other side of a 2500-pound car and try to run her over through that sonofabitch. how exciting must that have been to watch! that’s movie of the week type shit!! rachaundra says that ebonie backed up and then re-smashed into her car several more times—reverse-ram! reverse-ram! reverse-ram!—until she tuckered herself out. again, while i could never actually be ebonie for real, how great would it be to have the balls on this lady for maybe like forty-five minutes or so? a couple hours at most?? i wouldn’t want to live like this forever (frankly, it’s unsustainable!) but i’d take an afternoon of reckless abandon armed with a full mace can and zero consideration for consequences. i mean who among us could resist???

ebonie drove off and rachaundra called the police, and she’s brought the report with her to court today. the judge asks ebonie if this is true and she laughs (what a gangster) before essentially saying “kind of.” ebonie contends that rachaundra was actually the one going after her, and the only reason she hit her car was because she was trying to escape. ebonie says that as soon as she and her cousin arrived, rachaundra and her friends started coming after them with weapons (a knife, a hennessey bottle) and seemed like they’d been spoiling for a fight before they even got there. when greg asks ebonie why she didn’t just leave she says that she didn’t want to leave her cousin behind.

judge mathis isn’t really buying ebonie’s innocent act, and he asks cousin charlene (finally, a secondary character gets a goddamn name!) if she really needed to talk to her baby daddy during the halloween party of ebonie’s sworn enemy, or if she suggested it so they could go over there and set some shit off. charlene says that she did actually, she needed to go to the house to get some money from her dude. greg hates this lady instantly and i’m not quite sure why, but it’s clear that he has decided in the fourteen seconds he’s known her that this is all her fault because she really didn’t have an urgent need to talk to him, she just wanted to go over and get in homeboy’s business and be messy.

okay charlene is dismissed (what if these girls are lowkey the good wife and ebonie just brought charlene as a misdirect because she knew the judge would offload the blame onto her) and ebonie says that she did mace rachaundra’s friend, and when she did she accidentally maced herself. apparently rachaudra seized the opportunity and jumped on ebonie, then she and the friend tag-teamed emily until bob came over and broke up the fight. ebonie gets in her car to leave but rachaundra is wound up and dives into her open car door to keep fighting. ebonie, who was still blinded by secondhand mace, tried to flee and ended up hitting rachaundra’s car a couple times in the process.

i thought ebonie’s countersuit was going to be for car damages incurred during this little incident but thank the god of all hallow’s eve it’s somehow even better: one day ebonie was driving around with bob and they happened to see rachaundra while they were in the car. rachaundra immediately started tailing them. bob asked ebonie to drop him off at his dad’s house, but when they arrived he wouldn’t get out of the car because rachaundra had pulled up right behind them. eventually bob told ebonie to just keep driving and when she did rachaundra crashed her car into theirs. is this a real thing we are doing now, throwing cars around like nerf balls? i wouldn’t even gently toss my phone at someone and risk damaging it (my apple care expired years ago), how are they so cavalier about playing bumper cars with real ones???

the ruling: the judge asks rachaundra for her side and she says, “yep, my boyfriend lied to me about where he was and who he was with so i followed her to confront him.” okay, my sister in christ, wow. most people would at least send a foreboding “we gotta talk” text to make them sweat a little before they resorted to direct surveillance, but these girls are too tuff for that, i guess! she says that when ebonie eventually noticed her behind them she slammed on her brakes, forcing rachaundra to crash into the back of her car. these stories are so wildly different, i can’t stop fucking laughing.

ebonie gives the judge a witness statement from a person who lives on the street where the accident took place, and he basically says that rachaundra’s black suv hit the back of ebonie’s beige sedan, twice. but if ebonie brake-checked her is it actually rachaundra’s fault? never gonna find out the answer to that question, because rachaundra ended up in jail over this and greg wants to talk about that. he asks if ebonie went to jail for the damage she caused, and rachaundra says, “no because she was on the run for child endangerment, she had a warrant and they couldn’t find her because she was on the run.” what is this, one of my beloved $7000-budget tubi classics?

ebonie tries to gloss over the police report of it all, but it turns out that she was also charged and booked? rachaundra says their dueling court cases got continuance after continuance until finally the judge told the two parties he would dismiss them if they promised to fuck off and leave each other alone. greg calls bullshit and says the legal system doesn’t work like that, and he presses until rachaundra mumbles the words “suspended sentence” and the judge yells, “SO YOU ADMITTED YOU DID IT.” he turns to ebonie and asks if she too received a suspended sentence, and she hems and haws before finally saying, “i admitted to them that i did it” and greg snaps, “SO YOU DID.” in a kind of dad rage, judge mathis yells that they’ve wasted their time arguing in his courtroom over a man who couldn’t even be bothered to show up and he is now suspending this case, judgment for no one. that was a mean trick, but don’t worry here’s your treat: you can watch the tuca and bertie halloween episode i wrote in bed on your computer!!

did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “‘girl please?’ it ain’t no girl please, it’s girl bye. go sit down!”

*bangs gavel*

ps, 300 of these??? i should get a life!