A single missed date in Flint, Michigan once turned into a real courtroom case. A woman took her date to court and asked for $10,000. The video hearing that followed got so tense that a judge had to step in and take control.
The Date That Never Happened
Back in September 2020, a Flint woman named QaShontae Short filed a lawsuit against a man named Richard Jordan. The two had planned to go on a date, but Jordan never showed up. Short did not let it go.
On September 10, 2020, she filed a legal claim in Michigan’s 67th District Court in Genesee County, asking for $10,000 in damages.
Short’s claim was built around a legal term called “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” In plain words, that means a person is accused of causing serious emotional pain to someone else on purpose. Short said Jordan had deliberately and intentionally hurt her by standing her up.
She also said the timing made things worse. According to her filing, the date fell on her late mother’s birthday, and her mother had passed away only a short time before that. She said the experience left her emotionally shaken.
Jordan, for his part, saw the whole thing very differently. To him, one missed date did not seem like something that should end up in front of a judge.
The Video Court Hearing
Roughly two years after the lawsuit was filed, footage of the Zoom hearing between Short and Jordan spread online, and people could see exactly how the case played out.
Remote hearings had become common in Michigan courts around that time, letting people appear from home, work, or anywhere else with an internet connection instead of driving to a courthouse.
That setup meant the entire exchange between Short, Jordan, and the judge was recorded on video from start to finish. The hearing, held in front of Judge Herman Marable Jr., lasted only about nine or ten minutes, but it packed in a lot.
Early in the hearing, Judge Marable asked Jordan whether he planned to represent himself in the case, since he did not have a lawyer present. Jordan answered honestly, telling the judge, “We went on one date – one date – and now I’m being sued for $10,000,” according to footage reported by Fox 2 Detroit.
He added that he did not think the case should go any further and felt it was taking up the court’s time for no good reason.
Short saw things very differently, and it did not take long for the hearing to turn into something much more tense.
The Disagreement With the Judge
Once Jordan filed his written response to the lawsuit, Short accused him of lying in it. She argued that if his statement was not true, then he had committed perjury, a legal term for lying under oath in an official setting.
As Tyla reported from the hearing, Short told the judge, “If he responds and his response is a lie, then it’s perjury.”
Judge Marable pushed back right away. He told her flatly, “Do you understand what perjury is?” according to a report from Fox News, making clear she did not fully grasp the legal meaning of the word. Short did not back down. She told the judge not to insult her intelligence and insisted she understood the term perfectly well.
The back-and-forth kept building until the judge had heard enough. He asked court staff to mute Short’s microphone so he could finish speaking without being talked over.
Even after that, video from the hearing shows her continuing to speak while off mic, clearly frustrated with how the judge was handling her case. It stands out as one of the more heated small-claims hearings caught on camera that year, and it is a good example of how much virtual court hearings can reveal once they become public.
Underneath all the tension, there was a simple legal problem driving the whole disagreement. Judge Marable explained that a claim like intentional infliction of emotional distress is not something his court, the district court, was set up to handle.
That kind of claim belongs in circuit court, a different level of Michigan’s court system that deals with more serious civil matters.
Because of that, the judge ordered the case moved out of his courtroom entirely and sent to the 7th Circuit Court instead. There was a catch, though. Short was told she would need to cover the fees and costs of that transfer herself, and she had 56 days to pay them.
If she missed that window, the case would not just stay stuck — it would be thrown out completely. Whether she paid those fees and kept the case alive was not something later reporting on the story tracked in detail.
A Longer History of Lawsuits
The date lawsuit was not the first time Short had gone to court, and court records point to a much longer pattern. Over roughly two decades, going all the way back to the year 2000, Short filed close to a dozen different lawsuits across Michigan’s district and circuit courts.
Some of those earlier cases were even bigger in scope than the one against Jordan. In January 2020, months before the missed date ever happened, Short filed a lawsuit against a local police department seeking $300 million. A judge eventually dismissed that case.
Later that same year, in October, she also filed a separate lawsuit against the phone company AT&T. That case was dismissed as well.
Taken together, this pattern is a big part of why the date lawsuit drew so much attention once the hearing footage became public. It was not merely the story of a bad date. It was the latest chapter in a much longer legal history, playing out in front of a judge who clearly had reached his limit with how the hearing was going.