Remembering Judge Joe Brown's Homophobic Attack Against a Defendant

Occasionally when I'm bored, I watch reruns of small claims court programs on YouTube. I was annoyed yesterday while watching this clip from three years ago of "Judge Joe Brown." A woman was suing her friend for $190 for money that she says that she loaned him to hire a locksmith to get his keys out of a locked car. His defense? He never asked for the money and that she could afford to pay for it.

Pretty open and shut as cases go. But then Judge Brown went there during the cross-examination when he began accusing the defendant of being gay:

Judge Joe Brown: Young man. I'm a seasoned and proven mature man. It would do you a lot of good in your journey through life to pay careful attention. Don't roll your eyes like a woman. You're a man. Stand up straight! I hope you're a man. Stand up straight! i don't know. A lot of folks are down low these days. 

Defendant: C'mon, cuz! You got me ***'ed up. How you gonna come at me like that, judge? That's disrespectful. You're not acting like a man coming at me like that. 

Judge Joe Brown. Oh, but I am. 

Defendant: Oh, but you're not, folks! Unreal, man...

Meanwhile, the plaintiff and the audience are laughing and tittering at this interaction.

Instead of continuing with the case, Judge Brown continued along this line of discussion and increasingly upsetting and provoking the defendant:

Judge Joe Brown: What I have been most disturbed about... 

Defendant: So by calling a man "on the down low" is making a man out of him, right?

Judge Joe Brown: Be quiet!... What I used to see is when there was a man standing at the podium, what he was doing was behaving in a certain way and I saw the young ladies and they would act in a certain way. And what's interesting is over the last 12 years I've been doing this particular arbitration thing I'm doing right now and considering... the 20 years that I have done this before I have noticed an interesting transition. The boys are starting to act like the girls used to in terms of the body language -- rolling eyes... hand on hip... 

*Audience Cheering*

Judge Joe Brown: Women since time immemorial have talked over somebody who's trying to address them and you're talking over me just like you're a woman. So when you start acting like on, sounding like one, moving like one, then I'm going to put it out there...

And it went downhill from there. The defendant rose to the bait and began talking back to Judge Brown and Judge Brown ended up detaining him and sending him to jail for disrupting the arbitration process.

Judge Brown continues to accuse the defendant of being a girl and "down low" while he's being led out of the courtroom.

I've always been curious if the people that Judge Brown escorts out of the courtroom are actually arrested or not. You would hope not, but Judge Brown often seems weak to me in these moments. He defames and provokes others in these moments and then punishes when his defendants push back.

Regardless, this whole exchange comes off as homophobic and sexist and it irritates me that everyone laughs it off like it's nothing. I'm not saying that I would stand up and make a scene while he's in the midst of his tirade, but I would hope that I would have the courage to get up and leave the program as soon as the case ended before any other cases began.

You can watch the entire clip here.