Served With a Stalking Injunction Over a Neighbor Feud or a Social Media Fight? You Have Ten Days.

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Stalking is a serious crime. Domestic violence is worse. The civil stalking injunction exists so that a person who is being followed, threatened, or hurt can get a court order fast, without a lawyer and without a filing fee, and the police will enforce it. I have represented people who needed that order, and I have watched it work. Nothing in this article argues against it.

What I am seeing in my own practice is a different kind of case. Two families on the same street disagree about whose kids get to use the playground, or whose dog got out, or who parked where. One of them posts about it on the neighborhood Facebook page. The other one answers. Forty people weigh in. Somebody's spouse gets called a name in front of the whole subdivision, somebody drives past the other house a little slowly, and somebody calls the police. The officer hands over a packet. Two days later a judge who has never met either family signs an ex parte stalking injunction against one of them, and from that moment that person is one comment away from a class A misdemeanor, and the order will follow them for three years unless they do something about it within ten days.

I went looking for numbers to see whether this was just my caseload or something larger. The numbers are larger.

The Stalking Injunction Docket Has Nearly Doubled

The Utah courts publish filing counts by case type going back to fiscal year 2010. In FY2010, Utah district courts received 808 civil stalking injunction petitions. In FY2026, the year that ended this June, they received 1,549. Over the same sixteen years, total district court filings went the other direction, from 321,592 down to 276,771. The courts are handling fewer cases overall and almost twice as many stalking injunction petitions.

Protective orders are a different story, and I want to be fair about it. Protective order petitions have been flat to declining, from 5,085 in FY2010 to 4,591 in FY2026, and the state's own domestic violence report shows cohabitant abuse protective orders issued fell 22 percent between 2019 and 2024. Those orders require a relationship: cohabitants, dating partners, family. The growth is not there. It is in the stalking injunction, which is the one you can file against anybody, the neighbor, the other parent at the school, the person who runs the community page, with no relationship requirement at all.

The Police Are Required to Hand You the Packet

Part of what is going on is written into the statute. People assume the officer who responds to a neighbor complaint is exercising some judgment when he tells the caller to go get a stalking injunction. He is not, and it is not his fault. Utah Code section 76-5-106.5(8) says that a law enforcement officer who responds to "an allegation of stalking" shall give the alleged victim written notice, "in simple language," of the remedies available under the civil stalking injunction statute, including "a statement that the forms needed in order to obtain a stalking injunction are available from the court clerk's office."

Read that again. The duty is triggered by an allegation. Not by a finding, not by probable cause, not by the officer's assessment of whether two Facebook comments and a slow drive-by amount to stalking. If the caller uses the word, the officer is required to hand over the paperwork that says where to get the form. He has no statutory role in deciding whether the facts fit, and as far as I can tell nobody trains him to, because the statute does not ask him to.

So the referral is automatic. The form is online. There is no filing fee. And the next person to look at it is a judge reading a petition, alone, on the afternoon it comes in.

What the Statute Actually Requires

The statute is drawn very broadly, and the Legislature drew it that way on purpose. Under section 76-5-106.5, stalking is a "course of conduct" directed at a specific person that the actor knows, or is reckless about, would cause a reasonable person to fear for their safety or to suffer emotional distress. A course of conduct is "two or more acts." The acts expressly include communicating "to or about" a person, "directly, indirectly, or through any third party," and using "a computer, the Internet, text messaging, or any other electronic means." Emotional distress means "significant mental or psychological suffering," whether or not the person ever sees a counselor. And the statute says it is not a defense that the person was never told the conduct was unwanted, or that he did not intend to cause distress.

So two posts about your neighbor on a community page can be a course of conduct. Two slow drives down a public street can be a course of conduct. The person who did it does not get to argue that he was only defending himself online, or that he was on his way to the store.

The one thing standing between that definition and every neighborhood feud in the state is the reasonable person standard. The statute defines a reasonable person as "a reasonable person in the victim's circumstances," and the Utah Supreme Court held in Baird v. Baird, 2014 UT 08, that the test is "solely objective." What the petitioner actually felt does not matter. What matters is whether the conduct, in context, would cause significant distress to a reasonable person in her position. The court said the objective standard exists to protect "against criminalizing conduct that only an unreasonably sensitive or paranoid victim would find harassing."

Trial courts get this wrong with some regularity. In Corona-Leyva v. Hartman, 509 P.3d 236 (Utah Ct. App. 2022), a man got an injunction against someone who kept driving past and parking near his house, and the Court of Appeals reversed it because the trial judge had based the ruling on the fears of the petitioner and his neighbor rather than on what a reasonable person would feel. That standard is real, and it does real work. But it does its work at the hearing. It does nothing at the front end.

The Front End Has No Filter

The ex parte order is issued on the petition alone. Under Utah Code section 78B-7-701, the court may issue an ex parte civil stalking injunction if it determines "there is reason to believe that an offense of stalking has occurred." The judge reads a form the petitioner filled out. Nobody has cross-examined anybody. The court's own website tells petitioners they can complete the forms online and file them by e-mail.

None of that is wrong. A person who is in danger needs an order today, not after a contested hearing. But it means the ex parte order is only as good as the petition, and a petition that says "he has posted about me and my children eleven times and drives past my house" reads, on paper, like a course of conduct. The judge who signs it has not seen the thread. She does not know that the petitioner posted first, or that six of the eleven were replies to her, or that the "drive-bys" are a man going home on the only road into the cul-de-sac.

Then the order is served, and the clock starts.

Ten Days, or Three Years

The respondent has ten days from service to request a hearing in writing. If he does, the petitioner has to prove stalking by a preponderance of the evidence, with the respondent in the room, with the whole thread in front of the judge, and with Baird's objective standard applied.

If he does not request the hearing, the statute says the ex parte injunction "automatically becomes a civil stalking injunction without further notice to the respondent" and lasts three years from the date of service. Nobody looks at the evidence. Nobody applies the reasonable person standard. A form filled out on a phone becomes a three-year court order because the person on the other end did not know he had ten days, or thought it would blow over, or could not afford a lawyer that week.

That is the mechanism I am worried about. The temporary order is easy to get, and it turns into a permanent one by default. The safeguard the Legislature built, the objective standard, only applies if the respondent knows to ask for it, in writing, within ten days.

What It Does to a Person's Life

A three-year stalking injunction is not a slap on the wrist. It is a public court record. It is entered in the statewide system that law enforcement checks. It comes up on the background check an employer runs, the one a landlord runs before handing over keys, and the one your kid's school runs before you can help in the classroom or ride along on the field trip. It affects firearms. It gets used in custody cases. And every contact with the petitioner for three years, including answering a comment she leaves on your post, is a chargeable crime. I wrote about the practical effects separately.

Utah does allow expungement of civil orders now, but for a final injunction the earliest you can ask is three years after it expires. Six years is a long time to carry a court order because of a fight on a neighborhood page.

The cost to the petitioner is real too. If the respondent requests the hearing, she is in contested litigation she did not plan for, often across the table from a lawyer, against someone she still has to live next to. And if she loses, the statute lets the court order her to pay the respondent's attorney fees.

Both sides hire lawyers. Both sides take a day off work. A contested hearing with a lawyer on each side costs each party thousands of dollars, and the court is supposed to hold it within ten days, a deadline the Court of Appeals confirmed this spring can slide when the judge's calendar is full. The whole system is expensive, and it is being used to settle disputes that a conversation over the fence would have ended.

The Case for Leaving It Alone

The strongest argument on the other side is that the front end has no filter because it cannot have one. Victims of actual stalking are, by definition, being contacted by someone who will not stop. Requiring them to prove their case before getting any protection would mean weeks of exposure. The Legislature chose speed at the ex parte stage and accuracy at the hearing stage, and that is a defensible choice.

It is also true that neighbor disputes can be stalking, and the appellate courts have been widening that door, not closing it. In Ragsdale v. Fishler, 2021 UT 29, a man objected to a treatment program that opened next door and expressed it with signs in his yard and by swearing at and flipping off the people who ran it. The trial court refused an injunction on free speech grounds. The Utah Supreme Court reversed, holding that the First Amendment "does not automatically exempt him from being enjoined from conduct that meets the definition of stalking." This May, in Hasemeyer v. Lefevre, 2026 UT App 70, the Court of Appeals affirmed an injunction between neighbors in a property-line dispute where one of them drove a tractor at the other's wife. Those are the cases the statute is for. Nobody should have to live next to that.

The problem is that the same form, the same standard, and the same automatic conversion apply to the person whose entire course of conduct was two sarcastic comments and a drive to the grocery store. The statute does not distinguish at the front end. The officer is not allowed to. Only a hearing does.

If You Have Been Served

Read the papers. Find the date you were served. Count ten days. Request the hearing, in writing, before that day, even if you are not sure yet whether you will fight it. Requesting the hearing keeps the burden on the petitioner. Missing the deadline shifts it to you.

Do not contact the petitioner, at all, for any reason. Do not post about the case. Do not reply to anything she posts. Save the entire thread, in both directions, with dates, before anyone deletes it. Then call a lawyer. I handle these hearings on both sides. The hearing is where the objective standard finally gets applied, and it is the only place it gets applied. It is worth showing up for.

If you are the one thinking about filing, and what you actually want is for the posts to stop, think about whether a court order is the tool for the job. Sometimes it is, and I will help you get one. Sometimes the answer is to leave the group.

This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Contact an attorney to discuss your specific situation.