Headscratchers / Judge Judy

• For someone who makes a living insulting and publicly humiliating wrongdoers on national television, why has Judge Judy not met with any kind of retaliation? Judge Judy even confirmed in interviews that not once on her TV show has she met with any threats of revenge.
  • Maybe it's an odd case of Defeat Means Respect?
  • Or perhaps the plaintiffs and/or defendants are too intimidated by her to even think about it. This would put her as a Terror Hero.
  • What kind of revenge are you expecting someone to enact? No one is going to pursue an illegal course of action against a judge from a courtroom show on TV, and you can't sue for defamation unless what she says about you is false.
  • According to a commentator, she also has some kind of immunity as an arbitrator that makes it impossible for her to be sued for anything that happens during the arbitration. And anyone who appears on the show is required to sign something saying they’ll abide by whatever decision she hands down. So there’s not a lot anyone could do unless they’re really devoted to their revenge.
• Judge Judy is extremely vicious to anyone beating their spouses. However, she isn't any more forgiving to their victims. A couple of times in her courtroom, she actually yells at the battered victim for not leaving any sooner. What is up with that?
  • She sees the victim as partially responsible since they choose/chose to stay in a destructive environment. Cases where I've seen what you're talking about usually has the battered wife/husband/grown child complaining about how awful the home life was as they try and smear the plaintiff or score pity points. Judy will say something like "WELL WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST LEAVE?" Why didn't they? I am sure she would have sympathy for a person physically restrained from leaving, and who left ASAP, but that is never the case as I have seen it.
  • Judge Judy was a family lawyer and a judge in family court, so she's very familiar with battered women. Chances are, she's got enough experience that she can tell the difference between a woman that's truly the victim of abuse, and one that's exaggerating the "abuse" she faced to get sympathy in court.
  • Especially if the victim has kids.
• In one case, Judge Judy deals with the owner of a daycare service who called CPS when she discovered bruise-like marks on a child's back, but the marks turned out to be from some ailment or disease he had and there was no abuse. The mother of the child was suing the daycare owner for the trouble of being investigated - I understand the daycare owner was a mandated reporter who truly thought there were signs of abuse, but why is the judge so hard on the mother during the case? Instead of explaining the legalities of the situation and dismissing the case quickly, she spends several minutes berating the mother for filing it when she didn't actively do anything wrong. It was almost like Judge Judy thought she had been abusing her son.
  • The situation did not even need to take place if she had had the presence of mind to tell the daycare about the bruises. CPS obviously enough had their time wasted investigating, and no one can really blame the mother for that. But she is continuing to waste time and money by bringing about a lawsuit which, if Judge Judy's reaction is any indication, had no ground from the very start. What's worse, she decided to see Judge Judy about it. So not only is she wasting Judge Judy's time with what the law sees as a frivolous suit, she has decided to do it on national TV. These are already pressing some of the judge's buttons. And if the mother behaved like any of the other litigants that have appeared before the judge, she likely continued to argue the case despite being told constantly that she has no case.
  • On the flip side, there have been previous indications that the studio tries to maintain a certain amount of time for each case. Assuming the mother did not get a word in, the producers likely just left the camera running while Judge Judy was berating this woman to fill out part of an episode. As stated above, wasting time with a frivolous lawsuit is a good way to piss Judge Judy off.
• There are some cases that involve someone buying something on eBay that didn't work/wasn't as advertised, leading them to sue for the return of their payment. How did these cases last long enough to end up in small claims court? eBay has its own personal Money Back Guarantee — if you receive something that doesn't match the description, you tell eBay about it, they open an case, and refund the money accordingly, regardless of whether the seller wants to. Since when was it up to the buyer to personally demand their money back in court?
  • Since before 2013, when eBay's Money Back Guarantee program went into effect. Judge Judy has been running since 1996, and probably most of the episodes involving eBay scams occurred before 2013, such as the phone picture scammer (circa 2007). Before 2013, it wouldn't have been as unusual.