truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

In October, a man unnamed in news reports filed a lawsuit in Selkirk, Manitoba, against the woman who supposedly caused him mental distress by suing for child support. The man said he had been sound asleep during that 2006 encounter, but awoke to discover the woman having sex with him. He ordered her to "cease and desist," he said, and she complied (but nonetheless, a pregnancy resulted).

Patricia Howard filed a lawsuit against her USA Environmental employer in 2006 (just recently unsealed by a judge) for subjecting her to dangerous work during 2003-2005. The workplace was in Iraq and involved detonating surplus munitions to prevent their falling into insurgents' hands, but that was not the "danger" she feared. Rather, the munitions were located in abandoned football-field-sized warehouses that had long been home to pigeons. Foot-high piles of feces had dried and turned to powder, and Howard charged that the company's respiration protection was nearly useless, subjecting workers to Hantavirus and other diseases.

The U.S.'s most-ridiculed litigator, Roy Pearson of the Washington, D.C., dry-cleaning case (who in 2005 sued for $54 million over a pair of pants), announced in September he was appealing the dismissal of his case.

In December 2003, Yves Julien worked a regular 11-hour shift, plus overtime, all at premium pay, for the Canada Border Services Agency, and then demanded an additional $9 (Cdn) for a sandwich he had purchased when asked to put in the extra hours. The agency said he was not entitled, by contract, because the overtime was already at premium pay. In September 2008, after nearly five years of multiple reviews, hair-splitting legal decisions and lengthy appeals, Julien won his $9.

The Poor Dear: Harry Shasho filed a lawsuit against New York City in August for $190,000, charging that his Bentley was poorly cared-for at the city's automobile impound lot in 2005. It had been confiscated after Shasho fatally struck a pedestrian (for which he was later leniently sentenced, perhaps because the pedestrian was drunk). The city claims the only damage done was from the fatal collision, but Shasho believes city employees should have treated it better.

Roy Hollander filed a civil rights lawsuit against Columbia University in New York City in August, claiming that its "women's studies" curriculum teaches a religion-like philosophy that oppresses men by blaming them for nearly all social problems. (When interviewed by the New York Daily News, Hollander declined to give his age, saying such a revelation would crimp his pickup success with young women: Frequently, he said, women "think I'm younger than I am, so I don't want to disillusion them.")