New Jersey’s Prevention of Domestic Violence Act protects individuals in married, dating, cohabiting and co-parenting relationships from eighteen categories of criminal acts by their significant others, including harassment and coercion. In C.G. v. E.G., an unpublished decision dated June 30, 2016, Judge Lawrence Jones, Superior Court of New Jersey, Ocean County, reiterated that domestic violence is not limited to physical abuse and can include acts of economic harassment and coercion.
In C.G. v. E.G., the plaintiff alleged that the defendant had threatened her in text messages, had called her workplace without her consent to bother her employer and her employer’s wife, and had embarrassed the plaintiff by alleging that she and the employer were having an affair. The Court held that “economic harassment” includes purposeful acts of the defendant which are intended to either: (a) impair or obstruct a plaintiff’s actual or prospective job or job-related duties; or (b) threatening to do so with the purpose of controlling the plaintiff, and/or pressuring or intimidating the plaintiff into submitting to defendant’s demands or wishes.
Judge Jones opined that the methods of accomplishing economic harassment and coercion could include, but are not limited to:
- Directly threatening to contact the victim’s place of employment and attempting to get the victim fired, either by making false allegations, or improperly publicizing private, personal and embarrassing information about the victim;
- Actually contacting the place of employment and following through with actions designed to damage the victim’s status, and stability at his or her job; or
- Repeatedly appearing uninvited at the victim’s place of employment and causing a disturbance, or otherwise acting in a manner which is disrespectful of, and/or embarrassing to, the victim, and disruptive to the victim’s job responsibilities and performance, and/or standard business operations.
Judge Jones reasoned that a person has a basic right to be left alone by an estranged or former spouse or dating partner at his or her place of employment. The C.G. v. E.G. decision emphasized that a defendant’s acts to threaten or harm the plaintiff’s employment can constitute harassment and/or coercion.
N.J.S.A. 2C:33-4 defines “harassment” as an offense when an individual engages in the following behavior with the intent to harass:
- Makes, or causes to be made, a communication or communications anonymously or at extremely inconvenient hours, or in offensively course language, or any other manner likely to cause annoyance or alarm;
- Subjects another to striking, kicking, shoving or other offensive touching or threatens to do so; or
- Engages in any other course of alarming conduct or of repeatedly committed acts with purpose to alarm or seriously annoy such other person.
Judge Jones found that the defendant knew, or should have known, that he was improperly encroaching on plaintiff’s employment while subjecting her to embarrassment in front of her employer and co-workers. The Court found that his conduct constituted harassment under the totality of the circumstances under N.J.S.A. 2C:33-4.
In addition, Judge Jones further found that the defendant’s conduct also constituted acts of criminal coercion under N.J.S.A. 2C:13-5(3) and (7). Under sub-section (3), a defendant commits coercion if he or she attempts to control another by threatening to expose any secret which would tend to subject the victim to hatred, contempt or ridicule or to impair credit or business repute. In C.G., the Court held that a defendant’s threat to contact an employer to share personal or embarrassing information about the plaintiff at his or her job would cause the plaintiff emotional distress and place the victim in fear of damage to reputation and security.
Likewise, under sub-section (7) of the statute, a defendant may commit an act of coercion if he or she threatens or performs any act which would not benefit the defendant but which is calculated to harm another with respect to his health, safety, business, calling, career, financial condition, reputation or personal relationships (emphasis added). Under the facts in C.G., the Court made a finding of domestic violence under this sub-section as well.
In C.G., Judge Jones reiterated that not all domestic violence results in physical harm to the victim. In so doing, he found that the Legislature’s inclusion of coercion in the PDVA acknowledged the reality that a domestic violence defendant may attempt to wrongfully coerce, intimidate or control a victim through economic abuse instead of, or in addition to, physical abuse. Such economic harassment or coercion may occur when an estranged partner interferes, or threatens to interfere, with the former paramour’s employment.