Is the USA next?
A man was just convicted criminally of coercive control in England. Is this sort of law coming to the US?
It’s the sort of story that domestic violence advocates- particularly female ones- are likely to cheer.
In England, Grant Jeffrey was convicted and jailed for the crime of coercive control. Here’s more from the BBC.
A man who demanded his partner wear loose clothing at all times and kept curtains shut to prevent her seeing anyone outside has been jailed for coercive and controlling behaviour.
Grant Jeffery, 33, from Tonbridge, pleaded guilty and was imprisoned for three years and one month at Maidstone Crown Court on Tuesday.
He will also be subject to a 10-year restraining order.
The victim, who feared she would be harmed if she did not follow Jeffery's demands, lost weight and became so ill she was admitted to hospital.
The behaviors described are awful.
While she was undergoing hospital treatment in September 2023, Jeffery visited on many occasions and required her phone to remain on video call so he could observe her.
He assaulted the victim while at the hospital and was arrested by officers from Kent Police at a bus stop outside the building on 21 September.
Det Con Jake Squire, from the West Kent Proactive Domestic Abuse Team, described Jeffery as an "aggressive bully who used threats and intimidation to exert complete control over his victim".
"It is right he is now serving a prison sentence and I hope this gives his victim the opportunity to repair her health and rebuild her life."
Coercive control has been criminalized in England since 2015, and many domestic violence advocates have cheered on this law.
At first, it seemed sweet. Natalie Curtis’s boyfriend called her dozens of times a day, keen to hear every detail of what she was doing in her daily life: what she ate for lunch, who she saw at work.
But she says the longer she spent with him, and particularly after they married in 2016, four years after meeting, the more his behavior became intimidating. He made comments about what she ate. He picked fights when she went out with her friends. He threw her things around their house. He berated her while out shopping. One night, she says, he even threatened to kill her. “It’s such a drip effect, each event gets a bit worse and a bit worse,” Curtis says, speaking softly from her home in Essex, southeast England. “And then someone has control over you.”
“Coercive control” is the label domestic abuse experts give to the experience that Curtis, a 38-year-old safety specialist on the U.K.’s railways, endured. It encompasses a series of non-physical behaviors — including threats, humiliation, monitoring and isolation from friends and family — that they say can be just as damaging as physical violence, often causing severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2015, England and Wales became the first nations in the world to criminalize such controlling behavior within relationships, making coercive control punishable by up to five years in jail. Women make up 95% of those who experience coercive control and 74% of perpetrators are men, according to a study by one U.K. police force.
So far, the US has not criminalized coercive control; the closest is in Connecticut with Jennifer’s Law which makes coercive control a form of domestic violence.
Rather than criminalizing it, Connecticut allows for coercive control to be used as the basis for getting a protective order.
We’ve already seen that law get abused, when Chris Ambrose used it against Karen Riordan.
Attorney Alexander Cuda of the Needle Cuda law firm guided newly-appointed Judge Thomas J. O’Neill to interpret Jennifer’s Law in an entirely novel way.
Jennifer’s Law is a law in Connecticut that expands the definition of domestic violence to include “coercive control.” The law is named for two women, both murder victims by their husbands: Jennifer Farber Dulos and Jennifer Magnano.
On August 8, Judge O’Neill granted disgraced Hollywood writer Christopher Ambrose’s petition for Restraining Orders in Bridgeport Family Court.
Judge O’Neill, a former corporate litigation partner at Day Pitney LLP, became a judge in May this year.
Judge O’Neill barred Ambrose’s ex-wife Karen Riordan from seeing her children, Mia, 16, Matthew, 16, and Sawyer, 13, for one year. The teens were residing with her. They fled out-of-state to their grandfather, rather than reside with their father, Ambrose.
To obtain the TRO, Cuda shopped judges until he found Judge O’Neill, who ably twisted Jennifer’s Law to separate the mother and three teenage children who sought a safe haven with her from their allegedly abusive father.
Judge O’Neill based his Jennifer’s Law rulings on the basis that Riordan, a 110-pound special education teacher, was coercive controlling the teens to want to live with her. His fact-finding was based on Ambrose’s word alone. Judge O’Neill refused to listen to the teenagers.
Richard Luthmann and I discussed how coercive control was used against Karen Riordan, and he noted that the so-called coercive control was the children petitioning the court for protection from their father: as if Karen was so controlling that she was using that control to force them to make these petitions.
The question is, “should coercive control be criminalized in the US?”
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