I read stories about ridiculous lawsuits all the time and Adam Carolla was telling a story on his podcast this morning about one that he was involved in long ago and it reminded me of my own story when I was sued back in 2003.
I was living in Atlanta back then and was on my way back there after visiting TN for Thanksgiving. As one could imagine, traffic was horrible. Everyone had apparently been everywhere except Atlanta for the holiday and it was a mass of turkey stuffed families in SUVs headed down 85 South. It was me, my ex, and our little boy driving in my relatively new Nissan Pathfinder, it was like a 2000 or something, and we were behind this beater early 90's/late 80's Isuzu SUV from Alabama. The Isuzu driver was slamming hard on her breaks each time traffic would slow up, it was never the smooth pressing of the brake to slow down, it was a dramatic, "Oh, My God!! I don't know if my beat up piece of crap is going to stop." type of break stomping. I had managed not to hit this clunker for several miles but I couldn't get around it. Lacy, my ex, kept telling me that I was going to wind up rear ending them and just as I said for the hundreth time that I wasn't going to hit them, I ran right into them. It was a light tap, we probably weren't going any faster than like 15 MPH, and so we both pulled over. This was the beginning of the eventual shit storm that was to come.
I got out of the car to assess the damage and do all the customary exchanging of insurance and other information. I was waiting on the other driver to emerge and she didn't so much as step out of the truck but it was more of her rolling her way out. She was a large woman, chugging on her cigarette, with a backseat full of kids, and the resembalance of a pig. I am not just saying this because of her size, she had very pig like qualities to her. She had an upturned, puggy nose and she grunted when I spoke to her. I asked if she was okay and she made a grunting noise of reassurance. We looked at the rear of her Isuzu and there was about a 6 inch wide dent on the back, no big deal. We looked at mine and I had a broken headlight and a dent around it as well. I asked the pig woman if she wanted to call the cops or just handle it ourselves since no one was hurt. She snorted that we could just handle it between the two of us. So we exchanged numbers, I gave her my insurance information, and we were on our way. The whole exchange lasted less than 4 minutes. Lacy nor Gavin got out of the Pathfinder and none of the woman's little piglets got out of the Isuzu, everyone stayed in and buckled up.
I got back in the car and really didn't give it much thought. I was pissed at myself that I proved Lacy right by hitting the Isuzu, but other than that I was fine. We got back home, I replaced the headlight, and paid this guy with a rubber hammer to bang the dent out of my front end. I expected to hear from my insurance people soon but instead I got a call from an Alabama number a couple of days later. On the other end of the line, was a man that sounded the way that black comedians sound when they are making fun of how white people talk. Just imagine Chris Rock talking like a goofy white guy and thats what this guy sounded like. I thought it was a prank call at first, but then realized that he must be the husband of the pig woman. He asked if my name was Dustin Elliott and if I had been in a traffic accident a couple of days ago. I told him I had and explained what happened and he told me that my insurance wasn't valid. Apparrently I had forgotten to pay my insurance on time (I wasn't the most responsible 22 year old). I apologized and told him that I would just pay for whatever damage out of pocket. He told me that would not be acceptable, that I was in violation of the law and he wanted my driver's license number. I kind of laughed and told him, "Listen, the damage on your old beater was pretty minimal. I'll give you 200 bucks and we'll call it even." He got into a huge nerdy rage and made all kinds of threats, so I told him to go ahead and do what he felt that he had to do. He demanded my license number again, so I just spit out some random numbers and hung up on him. (Once again, I wasn't the most responsible 22 year old in the world)
A good month had passed and I hadn't really thought about the incident any further. I had moved on because it was such a minor thing, I wasn't suffering from emotional damage, I was able to move on with life as normal, and it was over in my mind. I was walking to my truck one morning to head to work and there was a guy standing around my Pathfinder taking pictures of it. I walked up to him very casually and asked non-chalantly, "Whatcha doin?" I startled him I guess because he jumped back and took several steps backwards. He asked, "Are you Dustin Elliott?" I said, "Yeah, who the hell are you?" As soon as the words popped out of my mouth he started taking pictures of me. I momentarily felt like a celebrity being stalked by the papparazzi. I asked, "What the hell are you doing?" He told me that I was busted now and that I would figure it out soon enough. So I told him that if he was going to take a picture of me to at least let me pose for him. I flipped him off and told him get off the property. I didn't know what that was about and shrugged it off and went about my day.
Well a week later I got a summons in the mail notifying me of a lawsuit filed against me asking for $75,000. It was from the pig woman and the man I would soon call Steve Urkel. I called my lawyer and told him about it so that we could sit down and look over it. I wish to God that I still had a copy of this thing because it was hilarious. It illustrated all that was wrong with our litigous society. Let me give you a breakdown of my list of atrocities committed upon this hapless couple:
- $3,000 in damage to the 1990 Isuzu, junker, piece of crap
- $15,000 for missed work due to having to get the vehicle repaired and being unable to drive to work
- $5,000 for the private detective that took my picture
- $2,000 for travel expenses to have to go to court in Georgia from Alabama
- $10,000 for lawyer's fees
- $40,000 for emotional damages caused to the pig woman
- The Bluebook value on the Isuzu was $1,900 for an excellent condition vehicle.
- The couple had a combined income of about $50,000 per year so missing three days of work to get the car fixed came out to a couple of hundred dollars at best.
- The private detective was their dumbass idea. No one told them to hire a PI, it was unnecessary.
- If it cost $2,000 to travel from Alabama to Georgia, then that meant they had to be staying at the priciest hotel in the area and were using tiger's blood for fuel. The trip would cost at best $200.
- They didn't even actually have a lawyer. They used a template off the internet to draw up the lawsuit papers.
- The emotional damage that the pig woman was claiming was that she was distressed because she worried for the safety of my child and the terror she felt when she was rear ended. She claimed that my child was sitting in Lacy's lap at the time of the accident (not true he was in his car seat) and this caused her great concern. My lawyer said that if she felt such terror and concern then she would have insisted on the police being called.
In Georgia, before you can actually take a lawsuit to a judge you had to go through mediation. I thought, "Sure, why not?" My lawyer warned me that if I didn't show that they would win by default and I would be ordered to pay $75,000. No problem, I thought. The day came for the mediation and I was driving to the court house and a cop comes up behind me, blazing lights and sirens. I didn't know what was going on, I was almost at the court house, so I just pulled into the parking lot. The cop came up to my window, with a very large grin. I hadn't been speeding, I wasn't swerving, I had all of my lights on, my tags were up to date, my insurance was paid, so I had no idea what was going on. The cop asked for my license and I presented it to him. He didn't tell me what was up yet, he was just quietly laughing to himself. I asked "What's the deal?" He told me that he got a call that there was an erratic driver in the area, in a vehicle matching my description, with a driver that had no license. I told him what was going on, that most likely the pig woman called so I wouldn't show for court. Luckily he agreed. He said it was pretty clear that I wasn't driving erratically but my license had been suspended. The pig woman had my license suspended based on her reporting that I had no insurance. Georgia doesn't require proof of a claim like that, they simply suspend your license and you have to prove otherwise. Turns out she had called that morning to report me, so there would be no time to notify me. Lucky for me, I got a sympathetic cop. He could tell the whole ordeal was a bunch of cooked up b.s. So he said since I was technically in a parking lot that he couldn't prove that I was driving and he let me go and wished me luck.
I strolled into the mediation room right on time and the look on the pig woman and her husband's faces was the same as if someone had taken a dump in their mouth. I smiled, sat down, leaned over, and whispered "nice try." My biggest suprise was what the husband looked like, I had never seen him, I had only heard his nerdy, goofy voice on the phone. He was exactly what Steve Urkel would look like if you put about 20 more years on him. They looked so funny sitting together, Steve Urkel and the Pig Woman, I still find it hard to believe that they mated. Anyway, the mediation went just as my lawyer told them. We tore down everything that they claimed and the mediator agreed with us. I wound up having to pay them about $600 (travel expenses and damage to vehicle) and they were out of pocket for $5,000 on the private investigator and a little loss of dignity.
Anyway this turned out to be a lot longer story than I remembered but the point is people can't get ahead by trying to be greedy and not working for it. This Pig Woman thought she could make a payday when her car was hit. Steve Urkel thought the same, they thought they were clever. But what they didn't count on was this: They were hit by a 22 year old with no money but a hell of a lot more brains than them.
I like to think that the Pig Woman and Steve Urkel are still married, living in some dump, surrounded by their nerdy piglets, and still scheming on ways to make money without working.
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