‘The Simpsons’ Meanest Character Was Pulled Straight From the Headlines
Not every early 2000s Simpsons parody would make sense to audiences today, but thanks to Judge Judy’s stubborn refusal to stop making television shows, Judge Constance Harm is still culturally relevant. Since 2001, the overly stern magistrate, based on the daytime TV star, has been voiced by Malcolm in the Middle star Jane Kaczmarek.
When The Simpsons finally returns in March, the mid-season premiere (in which Bart gets involved with “celebrity DJ-ing”) will reportedly guest star My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Rachel Bloom and Kaczmarek, implying that Judge Harm will show up at some point.
Oddy enough, her first appearance on The Simpsons was in an episode that was inspired by real-world events, even beyond the existence of Judge Judy. Season 13’s “The Parent Rap” begins with Bart and Milhouse being arrested for stealing Chief Wiggum’s squad car. While Milhouse gets the lenient Judge Snyder in court, midway through Bart’s case, Snyder leaves for vacation and is replaced by the Honorable Judge Constance Harm, who spouts Judge Judy-esque sayings such as “Don’t spit on my cupcake and tell me it’s frosting.”
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Judge Harm believes that the root cause of Bart’s bad behavior is Homer’s lack of supervision — so she orders the two of them to be tethered together.
In the DVD commentary for the episode, the episode’s writers, George Meyer and Mike Scully, admitted that the episode was based on a “couple of incidents” from real life. Although the premise may seem somewhat outlandish, there really was a case in which a parent was tethered to their child as an “alternative to incarceration,” which the episode was likely based on.
In 1995, The New York Times reported that a 15-year-old girl was ordered to be tethered to her mother for two weeks, and was to follow her literally “everywhere she goes except the bathroom.”
The teenager’s lawyer asked the judge to remove the tether and replace it with something less wacky, like an electronic monitor. But he refused. The judge’s original suggestion was to give them “a leather belt linked to a chain and manacle that her mother was to wear,” but he eventually allowed the “substitution of a nylon belt and tether.”
Shockingly, the plan didn’t go super well. The court order prohibited the mother from “smoking or drinking alcohol in the girl’s presence.” But school officials noticed that she had a cigarette while en route to school one day, and asked the judge to find her in contempt of court.
Things took an even more tragic turn the following year when the mother was admitted to the hospital after accidentally overdosing on anxiety medication. Her lawyer told the press that the tether ordeal “may have caused her anxiety." She miraculously survived that ordeal, but she died in a car crash just a few months later after visiting her daughter, who had been sentenced to juvenile prison for “shoplifting and petty larceny.”
In retrospect, it was a pretty sad story to adapt for a cartoon. At least the episode had a happy ending — for everyone except Hans Moleman.
