People often imagine stalking as a dramatic threat spoken plainly enough for everyone to recognize it. They picture the explicit warning, the obvious menace, the single sentence that makes the danger impossible to deny. But many stalking cases do not look like that. They look like unwanted contact, repeated boundary violations, proximity references, public fixation, escalating messages, third-party pressure, and conduct that becomes frightening because of the pattern.
That distinction matters. In D.C., stalking law is not limited to express threats of violence. The statute focuses on a purposeful course of conduct directed at a specific person that the actor intends, knows, or should know would cause a reasonable person to fear for safety, feel seriously alarmed, disturbed, or frightened, or suffer emotional distress. My perspective on this comes from representing clients in high-conflict matters, seeking court protection for people targeted through intimidation, and seeing how easily a pattern can be minimized when each incident is viewed in isolation.
The Pattern Is The Point
Stalking is often cumulative. One message may be ambiguous. One appearance may be explained away. One public accusation may be framed as commentary. One reference to seeing someone soon may be dismissed as harmless. But the law recognizes a course of conduct because the danger often comes from repetition, escalation, and context.
That is why courts and lawyers have to resist the temptation to break the evidence into disconnected pieces. The question is not whether every single act, standing alone, would justify protection. The question is what those acts mean when placed together. Repeated contact after boundaries are set, fixation on a specific person, escalating language, use of third parties, and references to places where the person lives, works, appears, or serves can create fear and emotional distress without an explicit statement of intended violence.
In my experience, people targeted this way often struggle to explain why they feel unsafe because the conduct is designed to live in the space between plausible deniability and intimidation. That does not make it harmless. It often makes it more destabilizing. The target is forced to ask whether the next message, appearance, call, post, or encounter will be the one that crosses into physical danger.
Threats Are Not Always Direct
Some threats are direct. Others are implied through timing, proximity, repetition, and history. A statement that might sound innocent in one setting can feel very different when it comes from someone who has been repeatedly contacting, watching, confronting, or targeting the same person.
Context changes meaning. A message saying “I will see you soon” may mean nothing between friends. It may mean something very different when sent after months of harassment, after prior confrontations, after unwanted contact, or in connection with a pending legal dispute. The words do not have to announce violence in order to cause serious alarm.
That is why the law’s focus on fear, serious alarm, disturbance, fright, and emotional distress matters. D.C. law defines emotional distress as significant mental suffering or distress, and it does not necessarily require medical or professional treatment. The harm is not limited to bruises, injuries, or explicit death threats. It includes the real disruption that comes from being targeted repeatedly until ordinary life, work, and participation in public or legal processes begin to feel unsafe.
Speech Can Become Conduct
There is a real First Amendment interest in protecting criticism, opinion, protest, advocacy, and public debate. Lawyers, public officials, nonprofit leaders, board members, and community advocates may all be criticized, sometimes harshly. That speech is part of public life.
But not every course of conduct becomes protected simply because it uses words. Stalking can involve messages, posts, calls, emails, public accusations, or statements routed through other people. The legal question should not be reduced to whether the respondent was speaking. The better question is whether the respondent was using repeated communications as part of a targeted course of conduct that caused fear, serious alarm, or emotional distress.
That distinction is especially important when the target is participating in a legal proceeding. Criticizing a lawyer’s argument is one thing. Targeting counsel, witnesses, parties, or protected persons in a way that appears designed to intimidate participation is something else. Courts should be careful not to convert the First Amendment into a shield for coercive conduct that undermines safety, access to justice, and the ability of people to seek legal protection.
Protection Requires Contextual Review
Anti-stalking orders exist because waiting for violence can be dangerous. D.C. law permits an anti-stalking order when a judicial officer finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the respondent stalked the petitioner and at least one act in the course of conduct occurred within 90 days before the petition. The structure of the law reflects a basic reality: intervention should be available before escalation becomes irreversible.
That does not mean every unpleasant interaction is stalking. Courts should examine evidence carefully. They should distinguish protected speech from targeted intimidation, ordinary conflict from repeated harassment, and subjective discomfort from conduct that would cause a reasonable person in the petitioner’s circumstances to fear, feel seriously alarmed, or suffer emotional distress.
But careful review is not the same as minimizing the pattern. If the analysis begins and ends with whether the respondent made an unmistakable threat of violence, the court may miss what stalking actually looks like. Stalking is often a campaign, not a single sentence. The law should be applied with enough attention to see the campaign.
The Law Should See Patterns
The hardest part of stalking litigation is helping the system see the whole picture. Petitioners often arrive with fragments: screenshots, emails, calls, posts, encounters, witness accounts, and statements that may appear small when separated. The legal work is to show how those fragments connect.
That requires chronology, context, and discipline. When did the conduct start? What boundaries were communicated? What happened after those boundaries were set? Did the respondent escalate? Did the conduct move from online to in-person contact? Did it involve the petitioner’s workplace, home, partner, clients, witnesses, or community? Did it interfere with the petitioner’s ability to work, participate in proceedings, or move safely through ordinary life?
Stalking is more than threats because fear is not always created by one explicit warning. It can be created by persistence, fixation, proximity, and the steady erosion of safety. The law recognizes that reality. Courts, lawyers, and advocates should recognize it too.
About the Author: Nick Harrison is the Managing Partner of Harrison-Stein, PC, a Washington, DC law firm serving small businesses, nonprofits, servicemembers, and individuals facing high-stakes legal and institutional challenges. He is an attorney, military officer, veteran, and former federal program manager whose practice draws on experience in civil litigation, nonprofit governance, military law, entrepreneurship, public policy, and crisis response.
