What to do with unwanted contact & harassment

Sometimes you get calls, text messages, notes on your windshield, or even visits from someone you don’t want to have contact with. Maybe that’s an ex-spouse, ex-girlfriend, somebody that was interested in dating you but you weren’t interested in dating them, a neighbor, or a childhood friend. Frankly, the relationship that you previously had, if ever, does not matter. What matters is that the contact has to stop.

In talking with friends and coworkers, someone will suggest a Minnesota Harassment Restraining Order. In some instances, immediately filing an HRO Petition is warranted. But there’s other reasons why you may want to take an intermediate step first. Sometimes a written warning can be the shot over the bow that curtails the harassment.

When it comes to the harassment part of an HRO, the legal standard is “repeated incidents of intrusive or unwanted acts, words, or gestures that have a significant negative effect or are intended to have a significant negative effect on your safety, security, or privacy.” While that’s a mouthful, it’s not that hard to prove, especially if you have good documentation that the contact was unwanted. If you need later to pursue a harassment restraining order, you want proof that contact they made to you was unwanted. This is especially true if you’ve had some sort of relationship with them where at one point contact was wanted.

When clients inquire of us about an intermediate step, it’s not unusual for us to recommend that they either send the following to them or have us send the following to them:

Dear So-and-So,

The purpose of this letter is to explicitly communicate to you that all contact with (enter name here) by you or on your behalf is unwanted. You should cease having any contact — telephone calls, text messages, emails, social media direct messages, paper notes, and any face-to-face contact — with (enter name here).

The reason I’m giving you this letter is that should this contact continue and should I pursue a harassment restraining order filed in district court against you, I can show them that I sent you a copy of this letter and that you were given the explicit instructions to not have contact with (enter name here).

As to how you provide this to them, old-fashioned USPS mail is favorable but there’s also good reason to send them this message in the same communication channels that they’ve been bothering you in: if they won’t stop texting, you text this back (before re-blocking their number). You get the drift.

You are going to want to talk to a lawyer about how to do this if you share children with this person, you work with this person, you share a property line with that person, or in some instances if that person’s an ex-spouse with whom you still have legal needs for contact. And also you want to talk to an attorney before filing a HRO Petition, as this is an instance where you want to make sure you’re putting your best foot forward so that, if there’s any gray area, there’s still good reason for the court to rule in your favor.

For the purposes of getting a harassment restraining order, harassment under Minnesota Statute §609.748(1)(a) is defined as:

1. a single incident of:
   • physical assault;
   • sexual assault;
   • using another person’s personal information, without consent, to invite, encourage, or solicit a third party to engage in a sexual act with the person, which falls under the crime of stalking​; or
   • nonconsensual dissemination of private sexual images;
2. repeated incidents of intrusive or unwanted acts, words, or gestures that have a significant negative effect or are intended to have a significant negative effect on your safety, security, or privacy;
3. targeted residential picketing; or
4. a pattern of attending public events after being notified that the person’s presence at the event is harassing to another.