Should you take ’em to court — “The People’s Court”?
Not if you’re Claudia Evart, a 56-year-old Murray Hill woman who has sought to block her episode from ever airing.
“It was a nightmare, and I wish I never did it,” says Evart, herself a freelance paralegal. “That’s not the way it should be — trying to seek justice, and instead I got aggravation and stress. It was uncalled for and unnecessary.”
Evart says she was contacted by producers for the show on Sept. 29, 2011, just days after she’d filed a motion in Small Claims Court in Manhattan against a local business, seeking her deposit back on a Murphy bed. (The show employs “spotters” to read through thousands of Small Claims Court filings a year in search of potential plaintiffs and defendants.)
“I just thought I’d win, according to their letter,” Evart says. “It was clear I had no chance of losing.”
The letter from “The People’s Court” does stipulate that, as in real court, anything can happen: “Should Judge Milian rule against you, ‘The People’s Court’ will pay you.”
She lost.
Evart’s motion offers an unprecedented look at the machinery propelling one of television’s most enduring shows, one that’s become, like much of television, harsher and more sexualized in recent years.
“The People’s Court” is so embedded in the American psyche that one of Dustin Hoffman’s refrains, as an autistic savant in 1988’s “Rain Man,” was “15 minutes till Wapner!” Even the show’s percussive theme song — “duh-duh-DUHN!” — is a precursor to the famous gavel beats that open every “Law & Order,” and the show was a harbinger of — if not an accelerant for — actual criminal trials (O.J., Casey Anthony) treated as entertainment.
Perhaps most remarkably, “The People’s Court” is a cultural staple that has been remarkably free of controversy. Until now.
Although the show has been sued by participants before, none of these suits made national or even local headlines. In addition to Evart’s, The Post found two other New York-based filings against the show, both settled out of court.
It’s the recent case of a Florida mom who vanished the day her episode of “The People’s Court” aired, however, that has caused the show’s greatest public-relations crisis in its 30-year history.
Michelle Parker, then 32, taped her episode in the show’s Midtown studios in June 2011. She was the defendant in a case brought by her ex-fiancé, Dale Smith Jr., 40, over her missing engagement ring.
Parker’s mother, Yvette Stewart, told ABC News that Michelle was “a reluctant participant” who agreed to do the show so she wouldn’t have to pay for the $5,000 ring.
“The People’s Court” is binding arbitration, which means both parties agree that the decision of a third, impartial party will be honored. The show pays all damages awarded to defendants and plaintiffs, as well as a $250 appearance fee.
“She said that it was ‘the most humiliating experience of my life — I don’t even want to see it,’ ” Stewart told ABC.
In Parker’s episode, which is still up on YouTube, her discomfort is palpable — as is how taken the show’s judge, Marilyn Milian, seems to be with plaintiff Smith.
She repeatedly flips her hair and smiles at him, spending almost as much time quizzing Smith about his hobby — dressing up for sci-fi conventions — as about allegations that he physically assaulted Parker.
Milian blows by his gratuitous comment that Parker is looking to replace her breast implants — and here Parker looks mortified — to return to the matter at hand: He has no pictures of himself in costume. (The two shown in the episode seem to have been added in post-production; the publicist for “The People’s Court” refused all comment.)
“You don’t have a single picture?!” Milian asks, incredulous. “I’m not gonna friend you on Facebook. I want a picture here!”
The Smith vs. Parker case took 30 minutes of airtime, and in the end, Milian ruled that the two should split the cost of the ring (an expense actually covered by the show).
In the post-verdict interview, the host asked Parker if her relationship, which he likened to the movie “Fatal Attraction,” had a chance of recovering.
“No,” she said.
In 2003, Smith, who had been court-martialed several times on charges of drug possession and domestic battery, was dishonorably discharged from the Marines. He’d been in trouble long before that: In 1990, he was involved in a bar fight in which a man was killed; Smith’s friend, then-16-year-old Phillip Muradanes, was convicted of the stabbing. That same year, Smith was arrested for felony burglary and marijuana possession.
Smith met Parker, a single mom to a then-6-year-old boy, in a Florida nightspot where she tended bar in 2006; he had been divorced once and widowed once. By 2008, Parker had given birth to the couple’s twins, but just one year later, she sought a restraining order against Smith, claiming domestic violence after he trashed her car and warned, “Your day is coming.”
Eventually, Parker took him back; as the two testified on their “People’s Court” appearance, they were perpetually on-and-off. Despite Parker’s testimony that Smith had grabbed her by the arm and dragged her around so forcefully that security at their hotel had to intervene, Milian assessed it as a co-dependent relationship — “You’re like a drug to each other” — rather than an abusive one.
“I know he hurt her many times,” Parker’s friend Angela Launer told ABC News. “[He] dropped her off in areas with no shoes. Took off and left her in Georgia by herself . . . No one should ever be treated that way.”
The last known video of Michelle was shot on Nov. 17, the day she disappeared, by a surveillance camera at a KFC drive-through in suburban Orlando, just hours before she dropped off the twins at Smith’s — the last place she was seen alive.
Eleven days into the investigation, police declared Smith the lone suspect, but he has not been charged; Smith’s sister, Lauren Erickson, recently told Geraldo Rivera that her mother had worked out visitation with Smith, who has custody.
When asked if she thought Smith did it, she couldn’t answer.
“Wow, that’s a big one,” Erickson said. “I think, as of now, no one’s been arrested.”
Milian, 50, is the fourth judge in the show’s history, and her immense popularity must be part of some visceral need Americans currently have to be hectored and lectured by well-coiffed middle-aged women (see: Nancy Grace, Judge Judy).
Milian, however, is a far more feminine, flirtatious presence. Although she also exhibits the Grace/Judge Judy brand of explosive, unpredictable female rage, her docket is far more sexed up, it’s cases like mini reality shows.
Born in Queens and raised in Miami, Milian is a graduate of Georgetown Law. She served as a judge in Miami-Dade County for seven years before TMZ’s Harvey Levin, who also produces and appears on “The People’s Court,” called. Milian is the show’s first female judge, and the first Hispanic; her predecessors, Joseph Wapner, former Mayor Ed Koch and Jerry Sheindlin — Judge Judy’s husband — were all white and, comparatively, laid back.
Milian has presided over the “The People’s Court” since 2000, and her tenure has been so successful — by 2006, the ratings spiked 72 percent — that it’s estimated she earns $5 million a year. (She still lives in Miami with her husband and three children and flies to New York to tape episodes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at the show’s studios on Fifth Avenue.)
Yet not everyone is as impressed with Milian — mainly, those who find themselves in her courtroom.
In a 2006 complaint, a former participant named Patrick Barlow alleged that Milian “was wearing an earpiece and at times interrupted testimony with crazy [interjections] such as, ‘You are not going to do a Mexican hat dance on me,’ and, ‘Who are you, Imelda Marcos?’ ”
In many ways, it’s inevitable that “The People’s Court” has gotten cruder — you’ve got to move with the times, right?
“The People’s Court” premiered in September 1981 and was hosted by the folksy jurist Wapner, with bit players Rusty the bailiff and host Doug Llewelyn. Although courtroom shows are nearly as old as television itself, “The People’s Court” was the first to cast actual plaintiffs and defendants rather than restage settled cases with professional actors.
Its concept felt both voyeuristic — here were real-life cases being thrashed out in people’s living rooms — and comforting, couched in a dramatic narrative framework familiar to everyone. In that sense, it was not unlike “Donahue,” which had revolutionized daytime talk and the culture’s general sense of just what private information was fit for national consumption.
Wapner’s docket back then — one episode was called “The Case of the Overdone Underthings” — seems painfully square when compared with Milian’s, which has included the appearance of a plaintiff named Mr. Sexual Blue, who was suing a would-be hire of his erotic house-cleaning service.
Milian opened the show with undue gravity. “Mr. Sexual Blue,” she intoned, “what is going on here, sir?”
Within minutes, she had auto-generated enough moral outrage at the defendant — who was ultimately deemed not well-endowed enough to clean houses in the nude — to send herself into a paroxysm of rage.
‘YOU DON’T HAVE CHARACTER TO DEFEND!” she screamed. “YOU WANTED TO BE A NUDE MAID!”
Evart, who will appear in real court on Feb. 1 in the matter of her episode, says her treatment by Milian was not much better.
“She didn’t let me speak,” Evart says. “Maybe two or three sentences — I had a lot to say, and never even got the story out.”
In the end, Evart was paid a $250 appearance fee and a $200 transportation fee — the only payments that the show guarantees participants.
Evart wasn’t awarded any portion of her deposit. She says Milian told her, “I know you. You always get what you want, but you’re not gonna get what you want from me,” and walked off the set.
More than her $1,600 deposit, what Evart would like back is her self-respect — and though she knows she signed her rights away to a retrial, she at least wants the show to never see the air.
“You have the right to be treated with dignity,” she says. “And I didn’t give that right up.”

Claudia Evart (Helayne Seidman)

BENCH MARK: Judge Marilyn Milian has helped bring “The People’s Court” — once the domain of the folksy Judge Joseph Wapner — in line with the reality-TV tastes of today. (Anthony J. Causi)
THE PEOPLE’S COURT, Judge Joseph Wapner, 1981-93, © Warner Brothers / Courtesy: Everett Collection (
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OPEN CASE: Michelle Parker, who was sued by ex-fiance Dale Smith Jr. on “The Peoples Court” (pictured) disappeared the day her case aired. Smith has been names the suspect. (
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