If a stranger starts following you in New York, gets into your Uber, learns your address, and leaves roses at your door, the courts can do nothing until it turns into a crime. A New York model named Lameka Fox lived exactly that and filed three police reports. The answer she got, she told CBS New York, was a question: “Are you sure it’s not someone you dated, because that’s the only way they would be able to attempt to investigate or offer a protective order.” She had not dated him. So the law had nothing for her. A bill that just cleared the State Legislature, now sitting on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk, would end that.
The legislation is called the “Ceasing Repeated and Extremely Egregious Predatory Behavior” Act, the CREEP Act for short (bill numbers S.3394A and A3226A). It creates a new civil order of protection that a stalking victim can get from State Supreme Court without ever having to be related to, married to, or romantically involved with the person stalking them. Per the bill text on the State Senate’s site, it adds a new article to the Civil Practice Law and Rules so courts can issue these orders, including emergency temporary ones granted without the stalker even being in the room.
The civil order of protection (a court order you can seek without first getting police and a district attorney to build a criminal case) runs through Family Court, which only has jurisdiction over people you have a family or intimate relationship with. The bill’s sponsor memo puts it plainly: “casual acquaintance” and “ordinary fraternization” between two people is, in its words, “explicitly placed outside of the jurisdiction of family court.” A jealous ex you lived with is covered. A stranger you matched with once on an app is not. As the memo says, a victim “may be just as likely to be harmed by a jealous ex with whom they cohabitated, for example, as someone they’ve met through an online chat room or went on one date with via an app.”
So the only door left is the criminal one, and that door does not open until you are already hurt. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez summed up the trap to CBS New York: “The only way to try to get help is when it escalates into physical violence or a crime.” The current law tells a frightened person to wait for the violence.
The other survivor who testified shows how the criminal route fails even when you use it. Melissa Patnella, a physical therapist, said she received hundreds of messages and was falsely reported to her professional board and to the FBI. She did get a temporary criminal order of protection. Then, she told CBS New York, “his charges were dropped by the state and my temporary criminal order of protection was null and void.” When the case went away, so did her only protection. A civil order under the CREEP Act would not vanish because a prosecutor declined to charge.
Stalking is not a fringe problem. The Stalking Prevention, Awareness, and Resource Center reports that stalking “impacts nearly 1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men in the United States,” per its published figures. And it has gone digital. Per statistics cited by Gounardes’s office from the U.S. Department of Justice and the American Journal of Criminal Justice, 80 percent of today’s stalking victims report being tracked with technology and report being just as afraid as people stalked in person, in the senator’s April announcement urging the Assembly to pass the bill. The sponsor memo names the modern tools directly: “cyberstalking, revenge porn, rapidly spreading defamatory material, doxxing, or deep fakes.”
New York is also late. The same announcement notes the bill would bring the state in line with 43 other states, “including New York’s five neighbors,” that already offer this broader civil protection. State Sen. Andrew Gounardes, the Brooklyn Democrat sponsoring it, said in a statement reported by the Brooklyn Eagle: “The CREEP Act creates a new civil anti-stalking order of protection that allows courts to step in quickly and gives survivors more, better options to stay safe. Forty-three other states have figured this out. It’s time New York did, too. Stalking and harassment destroys lives. By modernizing our laws for a world where harassment has gone digital, we ensure no New Yorker is left without protection.”
His co-sponsor in the Assembly, Jessica González-Rojas, frames the design as a deliberate off-ramp from the criminal system. “This bill offers something deeply important: a civil pathway to safety,” she said, per her office. “It gives survivors control and access to an order of protection without forcing them into a criminal legal system that they may not trust, may not feel safe engaging with or simply do not want to rely upon.” She added that stalking “happens online, through cyber stalking, deepfakes, location tracking, harassment across social media and the spread of intimate images. Our laws must catch up to the realities of the digital age.”
The advocacy behind it includes Carrie Goldberg, the Brooklyn attorney whose firm, C.A. Goldberg PLLC, has built a national practice around victims of online abuse, stalking, and harassment. Per the firm’s CREEP Act page, survivors who pushed for the bill alongside her included filmmaker Lily Baldwin, founder of the group Stop Stalking Us, and James Napoli, a client of the firm.
The bill did not squeak through. The State Senate passed it 59 to 0 on February 11, 2026, per the Senate bill record, and the Assembly gave it final passage 140 to 0 on June 4, 2026, according to González-Rojas’s office. Gounardes announced both chambers had passed it on June 5, per the Brooklyn Eagle. Not a single lawmaker in either house voted against it. If Hochul signs, the law takes effect 180 days later, per the bill text.
The one thing between New Yorkers and this protection now is the governor’s pen, and she has until the end of the year to use it. You can read the full bill, every sponsor, and the vote tallies on the State Senate’s page for S.3394A. If you want it signed, the place to say so is the Governor’s office, through the Governor’s contact form. The bill passed unanimously. Whether it becomes law is now up to one signature.
Featured image: U.S. Congress (public domain) via Wikimedia Commons
