Threat to Post Ex-Lover's Nude Photos Online Not Harassment, NJ Court Rules
A threat to post an ex-lover’s nude photos online may not be cool. But it doesn’t rise to the level of harassment under New Jersey’s domestic violence law, a state appeals court has held.
Monday’s ruling (PDF), the New Jersey Law Journal reported, reversed a trial court judge’s issuance of a restraining order against a 60-year-old married man, identified in court documents as S.D., who had threatened to post nude photos of his 19-year-old ex-girlfriend C.J. online in an e-mail message to C.J. and her mother.
S.D. and C.J. apparently met in a taekwondo class she had been taking from him, according to the ruling. The couple agreed not to see each other again after his wife and her mother found out about the relationship.
A trial court judge found last year that S.D.’s threat to post C.J.’s nude photos online was designed to annoy or alarm her, even if only psychologically, thus meeting the definition of harassment under the state’s Prevention of Domestic Violence Law, which is intended to protect would-be victims from immediate danger or further harm.
But the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division, said S.D.’s threat was a one-time occurrence designed to get his ex-girlfriend to return his calls and persuade her mother to recant something she had allegedly told his wife, with whom he was then trying to reconcile.
The appeals court also noted in its decision that C.J.’s domestic violence complaint against S.D. appears to have been triggered not by the threat to post her nude photos online but by a series of telephone calls he had made to her mother after she sent a letter to the CEO of USA Taekwondo informing him of S.D.’s relationship with her daughter more than a month after the couple had stopped seeing each other.
