Legal Question in Civil Litigation in Virginia

Re: What can I do about someone Harrassing me?

You might consider having an attorney send this person a well-worded letter. Or a lawsuit might stop them. Also talking to law enforcement and prosecutors might help you stop this.

Re: What can I do about someone Harrassing me?

There are limits to what the law can do, especially with relationships.

Human relationships can sometimes be aggravating, and to a large extent that is a part of life and not something that can be regulated by the law or government. The law under Free Speech allows people to say things that we don't agree with, or are offended by, and also to talk to us when we don't want to be talked to. So we cannot go too far in trying to use the law for relationships. There will always be people in life who are unpleasant.

However, sharing your personal information with other people -- especially to use it to harass you, certainly crosses the line. (Maybe the other stuff crosses the line, also. But FOR SURE that crossed the line.)

I don't know what type of personal information is involved or what the situation is, but that could be a tort of invasion of privacy, and possibly other things as well. (Would need to know more information.) If someone is recruiting other people to harass you and sharing personal information, I think this goes very far beyond just normal free speech.

(NOTICE that I am analyzing it this way because if you have to explain it to a judge or police, you want to emphasize the most legally-significant issues, so that they will listen to you.)

You also say that he or his friends are "threatening you with all kinds of things."

Of course, I don't know the details of what they are saying, but it is very likely that such threats would be enough to get a restraining order.

We would have to see what the "threats" are "of all kinds of things," but I think almost anything of that nature would be enough to persuade a court to issue a restraining order.

Now what good is a restraining order? Welll.... If someone is willing to do all that, they may be willing to violate an order on a piece of paper, too.

But a restraining order might wake them up and get them to take it seriously. (It may also make them angry.)

Ultimately if they violate the restraining order, they can be punished for contempt.

The fact that he is in MD may make this complicated. A VA court could issue the order. But to enforce it might require taking that order to MD and getting a MD court to re-issue it locally.

Note that a chat room is by its nature fairly public. So I don't think that would be your strongest evidence. By its nature it is a place where anyone can go and talk publicly.

But you should collect all of the other emails and incidences and print them out, and make a list of anyone who can be a witness.

You could possibly have a lawyer write them a letter to try to get them to get serious and stop. Unfortunately, many people will not listen to a letter from a lawyer.

But it is possible that a letter from a lawyer might stop it. That would save you a lot of time and effort and maybe publicity getting a restraining order in court.