post anxiety hearing retrospective, but nothing really changes

I feel like I'm a good enough time into my anxiety medication to address this in a transparent way. I'm going to talk again about what happened in court as to how my previous landlord was able to get a harassment restraining order against me.

It starts with the petitioner (white woman) filing harassment restraining order after her husband, the other landlord threatens to sue me for property damage. At the time there was an eviction moratorium in place and those are the two things that would override the eviction moratorium to be able to get someone evicted. The petitioner had put on the petition that she had moved out and listed everything that was related to me complaining about her ignoring my concerns in the harassment petition.

Of course I provided evidence to my side of the story to show that the petitioner was my landlord and she was ignoring my concerns.

Court itself was an absolute shitshow. First of all we got a different judge that we were not informed about. The original judge was a white man, and we ended up with a white woman. I have been around enough white men to know how to persuade them so I had a lot of confidence with this judge, but when we had a white woman, I knew I was doomed but I was still going to defend myself.

The lawyer (white woman) that the petitioner had hired a month after filing the petition was able to use technicalities to make it seem like she wasn't my landlord and I didn't really know how to fight back. She was even able to build a case that I was physically threatening towards her when I tried to confront her about something that she said in person and one of her friends eavesdropping on one of my conversations when I was expressing how frustrated I was with her. How

Going into court, with the unannounced judge transfer, the judge that we had had none of our evidence so it took us at least 30 minutes to fix all that. And then the petitioner took up most of the time in court to the point where I couldn't even present any of my evidence and my testimony had to be about 30 to 45 minutes.

It was far from a fair hearing, and of course I lost. And the attorney (older white woman) that initially volunteered to take my case to a friend of a friend decided that she agreed with the petitioner and bailed on me. She also identified more with the petitioner having short-term rented to a friend, but her situation wasn't anything like mine.

In retrospect, I have to admit that I didn't really take the hearing seriously. Seeing that white female judge pretty much sucked all the Hope out of me. Had it been literally anyone else, I would have paid more attention and been more proactive. Also, the anti-anxiety meds probably would have helped back then. I was focused on a lot of the wrong things and was slow to figure things out. You also never know what the person's going to throw at you in court. I wasn't prepared for any surprises and I made a lot of mistakes.

Something that I realizing in a lot of retrospect is that I should have joined in the petitioners attorneys push to get closing statements. We didn't do closing statements because we had already taken up a whole bunch of time and the attorney offered for closing statements via email. As someone who did not get their evidence represented in court, only got 30 to 45 minutes to talk and testimony, and was already very shut down, I also should have joined the push to at least get a few more words in. 

I say that I went in there and took up for myself, with all the anxiety I had, I really did the best I could. Coming out of all that anxiety, I really see where I feel short. At the same time, I honestly don't think anything I could have said or did would have helped because everything would have still gone the same way. The real shoot in the foot was that I didn't get to present my evidence and everything that gets presented in court is what counts. And I don't think that I can ask for a redo because the errors that happened were not legal errors by The judge, but technical difficulties. The judge was short on time and patience, and didn't want to go into 3 days so I could present my side of the story after the petitioner and technical difficulties had taken up so much time. 

As much as I'm glad that I asked her, the white female victim who doesn't stop there, and some people will even get killed over it. It's this overall system that empowers that kind of behavior that's the problem. This is why I believe all black and brown people should leave the United States and leave the white people to turn on each other.