Recently, there’s been a strange story going around TikTok. According to user Cheyenne Serano (@cheyenneserano), her boyfriend brought his car to a repair shop, only for them to steal it.
“Gary’s Auto Collision Center in Newhall, California, is actively stealing my boyfriend’s car,” Serano summarizes in one of her videos on the topic. Serano says this dispute has resulted in the mechanic, John Wright, “holding my boyfriend’s car hostage for the past eight months.”
Wright, however, tells a different story. According to him, the car has not been stolen. Instead, this is the result of a normal repair going unpaid by the TikToker and her partner. Who is correct?
What Happened Here?
According to Serano’s videos on the topic, her boyfriend, a man named Malcolm Moyenda, crashed his Tesla while on a mountain back in November, 2025. After calling AAA, the vehicle was eventually taken to Gary’s Auto Collision in Newhall, California. At this point, the couple says the car became the responsibility of the business owner, a man named John Wright.
“John tells my boyfriend that he needs to sign this authorization form in order for them to look at the vehicle,” Serano recalls. “My boyfriend says, ‘OK, but I wanna make sure that I’m not agreeing to pay anything. I wanna make sure I can afford it.’ John is like, ‘Yeah, that’s not what this is. We just needed you to sign this in order for us to look at the car.’”
In a video interview with BroBible, Wright affirms that he had Moyenda sign a preauthorization form before beginning work on the car.
“The amount of damage on the car…was pretty massive,” Wright explains. “So I said, ‘OK, well, we can replace the bumper, the fenders, we can fix the hood. Some of the components behind the bumper need to be replaced. I’m going to do the bumper, fenders, and the components behind the bumper.’”
This resulted in a quote of around $4,000, which both Wright and Serano say Moyenda verbally approved.
Things Start To Change
According to Wright, once the job had been authorized on the car, he set to work acquiring the parts that he believed were required to fix the vehicle. These parts, he said, needed to be ordered in and also faced delays. While this was happening, he says other work on the vehicle began.
“I painted the fenders, pre-painted them, pre-painted the bumper, did our pre-process to fit them to the vehicle,” Wright claims.
Around this time, Serano says that she started to feel uncertain of what was going on.
“Maybe two days after [the $4,000 estimate], Malcolm still hasn’t received a written estimate. And we’re like, ‘This is so shady,’” she says in an interview with BroBible, adding that other mechanics she’s visited have always provided a written estimate. “So we’re like, ‘Malcolm, you should pull out of this.’”
Moyenda then texted Wright saying he was no longer interested in getting his car repaired and that he wanted it back. In response, Wright wrote that he would attempt to cancel the part order but that Moyenda was likely “stuck” paying for it, as the parts request had already been submitted.
The Phone Tag Begins
From there, Serano claims that Wright became impossible to reach. The couple repeatedly called the shop and Wright personally, only to not be connected to him.
“John is dodging all of his calls, all of his texts, nothing,” Serano shares in a video. “The shop is answering, and the receptionist is saying, ‘Uh, John, John’s not here. I’ll have him call you.’ John never calls us back.”
During this period, Serano says that she and Moyende repeatedly stressed that they did not want any more work done on the car. Wright, however, says that he continued with the previously agreed-upon repairs.
According to Wright, this repair process revealed that the vehicle had structural damage. Consequently, he called Moyenda to provide an updated estimate. Moyenda responded by demanding his car back.
“He said, ‘I want you to take the parts off my car. I want to come pick it up,’” Wright says of the phone call.
Serano tells a similar story of the call, with a caveat.
“[Around January] 19th, John says, ‘Oh, there’s more damage to the car. You need to order more parts. And Malcolm’s like, ‘I told you in November I didn’t want to do this with you,’” Serano recalls.
“[Wright] says during this inspection process, additional structural damage, including frame damage, was discovered in approximately mid-January 2026. We had already asked for him to stop touching the car in November,” she adds. “There was no reason for him to continue to look for damage. If more damage was done, we would have done that with a different mechanic. We were not going to use him. We asserted our right to take back the vehicle, and he just didn’t allow that to happen.”
An Offer Is Made
Even though Wright says he received Moyenda’s message, he states that the shop was meeting the agreement that they had made over the phone. Consequently, he could not hand over the vehicle unless the couple paid for the repairs, no matter whether they wanted the additional parts he suggested.
“I’m already into it for parts and labor. So the parts, I can put inside the car, and then he can come tow the car out for the agreed price of $4,000,” he tells BroBible.
In an interview, Serano says that, if it were possible for the couple to pay $4,000 and tow their vehicle back with parts, Wright did not tell them this.
“If it’s ‘$4,000 for the parts that he ordered, and maybe he couldn’t have put them on, but we got the parts,’ we would have said ‘Yes,’” Serano states.
Serano countered that there was once an offer made by Wright to get the car for $4,000. However, this offer did not, in the couple’s understanding, include the parts.
What Was Actually Done To The Car?
No matter what offers were made, there’s still a question of what work had already been done on the car by the time conversations were taking place in mid-January.
Wright claims that he already ordered the parts and began the process of preparing them for the car.
After visiting the shop themselves on January 19, Serano and Moyenda allege that this was not the case. It is their belief that the car was in the same position that it had been when it first arrived. In their estimation, no repairs had been performed.
In a recent interview with Fox 11, a former employee named Vanessa also alleged that, around this time, no work had been done on the car.
“The customer would call every day to check in, and it wasn’t until they started sending paperwork about suing him that he started ordering parts and making phone calls,” Vanessa alleges. The former employee further claimed that customers were regularly told their repairs were in progress, even when no work was actually being done.
Speaking with Fox 11, Wright says he did not instruct Vanessa to mislead customers.
“I did not tell her to lie. Those words did not come out of my mouth,” Wright told Fox 11. “She would ask me, and I would tell her that we were working on the car because we are technically working.”
Evidence Of The Repairs
Wright claims that, by mid-January, work had already begun on the vehicle. What work was done by this time, however, is unclear with publicly available information.
In an ongoing trial about this dispute, Wright submitted evidence showing the work done to the car. The photos given in the 127-page document show vehicle damage and some of the repairs being performed. These photos do not have dates indicating when they were taken.
Over a video call, Wright provided more photos showing the car in the shop. In these photos, it’s unclear if any work is actively being performed or if damage and repairs are simply being documented. The program used by Wright states the photos were taken on February 24, 2026.
The invoice provided in the court documents, dated November 30, 2025, says that, at the time of the invoice, there are “no parts installed on vehicle” and that Moyenda or Serano were advised that “parts will be put in the car once the 4000.00 is received.”
Despite the invoice reading that it was created in November, 2025, the text recounts a conversation had on January 26, 2026. This makes the timeline surrounding the invoice and the repairs noted therein unclear.
Given this, it’s uncertain what repairs had provably occurred by the end of January. But no matter what had been done by January 26, 2026, Serano and Moyenda wanted the vehicle back. According to the couple, they visited the shop once again and saw that, as best they could tell, no substantial work had been done on the car since their last visit—or, potentially, since they brought it to the shop in the first place.
As such, they decided to have a lawyer send Wright a demand letter asking for the release of the vehicle that same day.
The Demand Letter And The Lien
Wright cites his receipt of the demand letter as one of the reasons he was unresponsive to phone calls.
“When I get things like that, it tells me the customer, one, is not going to pick up the car without paying me, and two, that leaves me high and dry,” he explains. He later adds, “I wrote them an email and said, ‘Listen, you’ve hired a lawyer, so now we have to do everything in writing. I’m not going to take any more phone calls from you. Everything has to be in writing.’”
Serano disputes this reasoning, saying that the couple “didn’t receive any meaningful communication from him from November 26th to January 26th,” reiterating that Wright repeatedly ignored their calls during this time.
The following day, Wright filed a lien against the vehicle. The lien, available via court documents, states that “charges to date on this Vehicle are $158,983.00” and that the number will increase by $450 on a daily basis, per the initial preauthorization.
Is The Lien Real?
Serano disputes the legitimacy of the lien. For the lien to be legitimate, she says, the authorized work would have needed to be completed. She claims it was not by the time the lien was sent. Consequently, she says the lien is invalid.
In response, Wright reiterates his stance that work was done on the car. Furthermore, he states that the work performed on the car constituted what had already been preauthorized and was still unpaid. Thus, he says the lien is real, and he is legally allowed to file it.
Regarding the total amount, Wright says in an interview with BroBible that this number was calculated by his “lien company” based on the total length of the lien time and the fees associated with leaving the car at his shop.
“I always tell people: it’s a fictitious number. How are you going to pay me $200,000 for a car that’s worth $35,000?” he says, referring to the continually-increasing dollar amount on the lien. “But it says in my authorization form that you will be charged ‘up to $450 a day’—not that I charge $450 a day. It leaves the door open so I can negotiate with them to get the car taken care of.”
Who Owns The Car?
Finally, Serano claims in a video that the couple was told that the car no longer belonged to them.
“They’re like, ‘Yeah, this isn’t your car anymore. It’s ours. You signed away your rights with this repair authorization form,’” Serano states in a video. “My boyfriend’s like, ‘What the f— are you talking about? No, I didn’t. Give my car back.’ They refused to release the car…It’s on a lot. They have tons of cars blocking it. We can’t get it off the property.”
“No one would tell her that because it’s not true,” Wright responds in a BroBible interview. “We have a possessory lien against them for what I’m owed on the vehicle. It’s like if someone puts a lien on your house. You can’t sell the house without paying the lien off first.”
In the interview with BroBible, Serano clarifies that Wright did not say these words, nor was it a verbatim quote. Instead, she says it’s a summary of statements made by “a guy…from one of the other shops” owned by Wright. She alleges this man was present when she was checking on the status of Moyenda’s vehicle.
“He said something along the lines of, ‘No, you’re not [getting this vehicle]. This is ours now. You’re not taking it,’” Serano shares. “And he was kind of going on about how ‘The last person that this happened to, it didn’t end well for them, so you should probably leave.’”
Another Offer Is Made
At some point during all of this, another conversation was had between Moyende and Wright. Both sides give a slightly different recounting of the event.
In Serano’s telling, Moyenda reached out to Wright to try to resolve the ongoing issue.
“Malcolm said, ‘OK, how much to get the car back?’…And Malcolm’s like, ‘I’ll give you $5,000’ — which is more than what was agreed upon,” Serano shares. “He’s like, ‘I just want my car back. I need my means of transportation.’ And [Wright] said, ‘$35,000.’ $35,000 is what the car is worth, and he hasn’t done anything to it.”
Wright’s telling did not mention the alleged offer of $5,000, though he did confirm that he offered to end the issue for $35,000.
“He texted me. I was out at our anniversary with my wife. He had texted me the week prior, ‘How much to get my car out?’ So I texted him back while we were out there and I said, ‘Listen, the lien is at $220,000 right now. If you give me $35,000, we can walk away from this clean,’” Wright recalls. “But I knew he didn’t have the money. He doesn’t have the money to fix his car.”
What Happens Now?
Serano is continuing to post videos on social media about her and her partner’s experience at the shop.
“I really just feel like [Wright] has abused his authority in being a mechanic and being able to assert a lien on someone’s property, and he’s now doing this to try to just scam us into giving him money that he hasn’t done any work for,” Serano says. “You take a mechanic to fix your car, not to cause further damage and then pay for what the car is worth to take your own property back.”
Serano also recently reposted reporting from Fox 11 in which another customer, a man named Mark Haberman, says he paid $20,000 for repairs to his truck at Wright’s shop. Over a year later, Haberman claims the car is “almost untouched.”
In response to Haberman, Wright said he was “not stopping from working on the vehicle.” He added he expected it to be done by July 10, 2026.
Speaking with BroBible, Wright reiterated his stance on the lawsuit and ongoing issue with Serano.
@cheyenneserano WE JUST WANT THE CAR BACK #fyp #losangeles #lawyersoftiktok
“I’m sitting on a $5,000 car and money out of my pocket, and it’s just sitting there. I can’t do anything until we get through with all this civil process, which they filed,” he says. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, you guys are filing the court action.’ No, I didn’t file a court action at all. The only thing I did was file a lien, because I need to get paid for what I did to the car.”
A mediation hearing is scheduled for July 30.