If someone is following you, showing up where you are, or contacting you again and again after you have asked them to stop, the question is practical: what do I do, and in what order? If you are in immediate danger, call 911. Otherwise the order is this. Start a written record today. Preserve what the person sends instead of deleting it. Report to law enforcement. Close off the ways the person may be following your movements. Then decide about an injunction.
Be clear about one thing first. An injunction is worth having, because it gives police and prosecutors authority to act on conduct that is otherwise hard to charge. It is also a court document rather than a physical barrier, and no one can promise it will stop a determined person. Treat it as one layer of a plan. To talk any of this through, the National Domestic Violence Hotline answers 24 hours a day at 1-800-799-7233, and you can text START to 88788 if a call would not be safe.
Start the record today, and build it the way a court reads it
Florida defines stalking as willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly following, harassing, or cyberstalking another person. The phrase that decides most cases is course of conduct: a series of acts over a period of time, however short, that shows a continuity of purpose. Florida appellate courts have generally required proof of at least two separate qualifying incidents before a stalking injunction will stand. A single entry rarely carries a petition. A patient, dated record often does.
Keep one running document. For every incident, write down:
- The date, the time, and where you were.
- What happened, and what was said, as close to word for word as you can manage.
- How the person arrived and left, with a vehicle description or plate.
- Who else saw or heard it, with a phone number if you have one.
- What you did in response, and the case number if a report was taken.
- What it cost you: a missed shift, a changed route home, a night without sleep. The law asks whether the conduct caused substantial emotional distress, and these details are what show it.
Write the entry the same day when you can, and keep a backup the person cannot reach.
Preserve what the person sends you, do not delete it
The instinct is to delete the messages and get them out of sight. It is understandable and it destroys your evidence.
- Screenshot messages with the timestamp and the sender's number or handle visible, and leave the originals on the device.
- Save voicemails rather than clearing them, and keep emails in place instead of forwarding and deleting.
- Photograph property damage, notes, and anything left at your home or car.
- Ask a neighbor or nearby business about camera footage quickly, because most systems record over themselves within days.
Preserving is not engaging. You do not owe a reply.
One firm limit. Do not try to get into the other person's phone, email, or accounts, even if you know the password and even if the account was once shared. That can expose you to criminal and civil liability and undermine the case you are building. If you believe a tracking device or an app has been placed on your car or your phone, tell law enforcement rather than handling it yourself. Florida makes it a crime to install a tracking device or tracking application on another person's property without consent, and the penalties were increased in 2025.
Report it, even when one incident feels too small to mention
Call the Tampa Police Department or the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, depending on where it happened, and ask for a report. Write down the case number and add it to your log. On its own, a drive-by or an unwanted delivery can feel too minor to report. Collected in a file with dates, those reports are the pattern.
A police report is not a prerequisite to an injunction, and charges do not have to be filed. Reports help because someone other than you made them at the time. Stalking is a first degree misdemeanor in Florida, and where the person also makes a credible threat it becomes aggravated stalking, a third degree felony.
Close the doors the person may be using
Work from a device you are confident about, and consider doing it with an advocate.
- Change passwords on email first, then banking, then everything tied to them, and turn on two step verification.
- Update the recovery email address and phone number on your main accounts. That is the door people most often forget.
- Review the location sharing you have turned on: phone locator features, map apps, family plans, fitness apps, your car's connected app. Check any shared phone plan or cloud account as well.
- Tighten your social media and ask friends not to tag you or post where you are. Check your children's accounts too.
- Tell the people who staff the doors you walk through: your workplace, your building office, your children's school or daycare.
Florida's Address Confidentiality Program, run through the Office of the Attorney General, gives participants a substitute mailing address so public records are not a way to find them. Victims of stalking may apply.
Then decide about an injunction
Which injunction fits depends on your relationship to the person, not on how frightened you are. Stalking and cyberstalking injunctions cover people with no domestic relationship to you. Domestic violence injunctions cover a spouse, a former spouse, someone you have a child with, or someone you have lived with as a family. Two companion articles carry that detail, and our domestic violence and injunctions page is the place to start.
A few practical points apply either way. The clerk cannot charge a filing fee, and you are not required to have an attorney to file, though the other party may bring one. In Hillsborough County these petitions go to the Clerk of the Circuit Court, and the injunction docket is heard at the George Edgecomb Courthouse, 800 E. Twiggs Street in Tampa. A judge may enter a temporary injunction without the other person present, in effect for up to 15 days, with the full hearing set before that period runs out. At that hearing, the record you have been keeping is what you present. The Spring of Tampa Bay, the county's certified domestic violence center, helps people prepare petitions and runs a 24 hour hotline at (813) 247-7233.
If an order is entered, keep a copy with you and leave one at work. If the person contacts you or comes near you in a way the order forbids, call 911 rather than confronting the person. Violating a stalking or a domestic violence injunction is a criminal offense in Florida. Keep the log going, because enforcement rests on the same record that won the order.
When the person is a spouse, an ex, or your child's other parent
Then the stalking sits inside a family case and the two move together. Exchanges under a parenting plan, contact terms, and use of a shared home become part of the picture, and what is said at an injunction hearing can matter later in the divorce or the time-sharing case.
What to do next
Today: open the log, write down what has already happened, back up your messages, change your passwords from a device you trust, and save the hotline number where you can reach it. This week: report the incidents, gather the documents, and decide whether to file. If a marriage, children, or a shared home are also involved, speak with a family law attorney early, so the two are handled as one problem.
Rechel & Associates, P.A. has been serving Tampa Bay families since 1992, focused exclusively on divorce and family law.