C.C. v. J.A.H., 463 N.J. Super. 419 (App. Div. 2020). The Prevention of Domestic Violence Act, N.J.S.A. 2C;25-17 et seq., allows the issuance of a restraining order for the protection of any “victim of domestic violence.” Such victims include “any person who has been subjected to domestic violence by a person with whom the victim has had a dating relationship.” But the statute does not define “dating relationship.”
The question in today’s opinion by Judge Rose was whether the parties had a “dating relationship” even though they never went on a date. They had met at a fitness center where plaintiff, a 22-year-old woman, was the general manager and defendant, a man almost twenty years older, was a new member. Defendant worked out there three to five times per week, and he often engaged plaintiff in “intimate conversations about her personal life.”
Eventually, defendant gave plaintiff his cellphone number. She did not use it right away. But then the parties began to text each other “at all hours of the day and night. Many of the messages were sexually explicit and suggestive in nature. The parties discussed in graphic detail: their sexual preferences; their prior dating experiences; their recreational drug and alcohol use; and the traits they desired in a partner.” Within less than two months, their text messages totaled well over 1,300, with defendant suggesting that they should “hook up,” which plaintiff believed meant sexual intercourse..
The parties planned a date, but first one and then the other cancelled. Finally, plaintiff texted that she saw no need for further communication other than “as a friend.” Defendant then sent plaintiff a “barrage” of “vulgar, insulting, and threatening” messages over the next eighteen hours.
Among other things, defendant threatened to have plaintiff fired from her job for allegedly taking an unauthorized picture at the gym. He also said that he would sue her, knowing that she lacked the funds to hire a defense attorney. Someone tried to access her cellphone account without authorization. Plaintiff believed that it was defendant because an internet search of his name that she did after the relationship blew up showed that a woman in Pennsylvania whom defendant had been convicted of stalking and harassing had had someone try to access her cellphone account without authorization.
Plaintiff reported the situation to the police and to the fitness center, which cancelled defendant’s membership. At that time, plaintiff learned that someone had accessed defendant’s electronic membership file and changed his address to her home address.
Plaintiff then sought an order of protection. Defendant opposed that, asserting that the parties had not had a “dating relationship,” as required for such an order. The Family Part concluded that there had been a dating relationship on the facts of the case, and that defendant had committed harassment, which is a predicate offense of domestic violence that supports an order of protection.
Defendant appealed, and today the Appellate Division affirmed. Judge Rose applied deferential review to the Family Part’s findings of fact and de novo review to its legal conclusions. In affirming the finding of a “dating relationship,” she invoked the multi-part test of S.K. v. J.H., 426 N.J. Super. 230 (App. Div. 2012). But those factors were not determinative. Instead, Judge Rose emphasized the need to “consider the parties’ own understanding of their relationship as colored by socio-economic and generational influemces,” and the “strong public policy against domestic violence.”
Ultimately, even though the parties had “never experienced a single in-person ‘date,'” and had “never engaged in sexual relations, kissed, or even held hands,” the “nature and proliferation of [their text] communications constituted the parties’ ‘dating activities’ and transformed theirs into a ‘dating relationship.'” The intimate “plethora of sexual communications” supported the Family Part’s conclusion that the parties had a close relationship, with more communication than if they had gone to dinner together a few times.
Judge Rose observed that texting and other electronic communications “can form bonds that may be no less intimate than sharing a dinner or movie.” Since “dating is a loose concept that changes from one generation to the next, the volume and intensity of text message communications can establish a dating relationship, even in the absence of a traditional in-person date.”
Defendant relied on S.K., in which the parties never knew each other before they had their only “date,” socializing and dancing at a bar on a group vacation. Here, the parties knew each other and engaged in “profoundly intimate conversations that occurred regularly in person at the gym and incessantly by text message.
Defendant had some other arguments, all of which Judge Rose quickly dispatched. The panel thus affirmed the order of protection.