Tesla’s racism trial in California opened Monday with a bad day for the company’s lawyers. The first witness testified that a senior Tesla in-house attorney had called him last week and let him believe he was working for the state, according to Law360 (paywall).

That same morning, Tesla’s outside counsel told the judge the N-word is a “term of respect and endearment” in the Black community. Both happened in front of Judge Peter Borkon, the one person who will decide the case.

Tesla is asking a federal judge for emergency access to a supplier’s plant in Troy, Texas, so it can haul out the tooling it needs to keep building the Cybertruck.

The supplier, Angstrom Automotive Group, is closing the plant and won’t let Tesla in. Tesla says that without those dies, several thousand Cybertrucks already committed to customers don’t get built.