By DAVE DANFORTH Daily Press Staff Writer
When a boyfriend and girlfriend break up, the results often need cleaning up not in divorce court, but in a small claims courtroom.
Consider the case of Alex Martin and Carrie Gold, who’d maintained a three-year-plus relationship at least through last August, when Gold’s car got damaged with Martin at the wheel.
Gold claimed her car sustained $3,265 in damage after Martin scraped it along a pole in front of her West Los Angeles home. Martin said he had started the car to take Gold out on a date when he noticed it was parked so close to the pole that it couldn’t be moved without scraping it.
“I didn’t move it an inch and it hit the pole,” Martin told commissioner Donna Groman in court recently. Gold’s insurance paid for most of the repair, leaving her on the hook for the $1,000 deductible. She looked to Martin to pay it.
Martin maintained that he had tried, but, as an unemployed but aspiring actor and voice-over artist, it was difficult. So he offered to let Gold, who is a nurse, drive his car. That offer didn’t work out well when Gold said the car completely died near the corner of Pico and San Vicente boulevards, leaving her to stash it at a nearby repair shop so she could go back to work.
“I didn’t know what was wrong, but it wasn’t moving,” Gold told the judge.
Martin said Gold had burned out the clutch on his stick shift — he said he’d forgotten to consider that she didn’t know how to drive a manual car. The repairs, Martin said, cost him $738.
He also said he allowed Gold to charge a $275 home study course to his credit card. The charge and the burned-out clutch should take care of the repairs to Gold’s car, shouldn’t they? He posed the question to Commissioner Groman, who grappled with whether or not to allow them as a legal “offset” or counterclaim to Gold’s bill.
Martin, who is from Santa Monica, said his money problems began when he left his prior career as a census bureau interviewer to pursue a career as an actor.
How are the pair getting along now?
Gold called Martin’s claim a distraction and “red herring” and left the courthouse in a huff.
Martin excused Gold for acting a bit moody, but said she’d called him recently to see him.
Commissioner Groman hasn’t yet ruled on the case.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 8, 2003. Read the original PDF.