Roommate harassment laws give you several overlapping tools: criminal charges for threats, stalking, or illegal recording; civil protective orders that bar contact; landlord action under the lease; Fair Housing complaints when the harassment is discriminatory; and in some cases the right to break your lease or sue for damages. Which one fits depends on what your roommate is doing, whether you’re both on the lease, and how well you’ve documented the behavior. All 50 states have anti-stalking and harassment statutes, and federal protections apply when the conduct is discriminatory or occurs in federally assisted housing.1Office of Justice Programs. Anti-Stalking Statutes
What Actually Counts as Harassment
Dirty dishes, loud music, and thermostat fights are not harassment, however maddening they feel. The legal line sits where a reasonable person would feel threatened, unsafe, or unable to live peacefully at home. Three patterns show up most often in roommate conflicts.
Threats and intimidation. Verbal threats of physical harm, destroying your things, or physically blocking you in a hallway can be prosecuted as criminal threats or assault in most states, even without any physical contact. You don’t need a family or romantic tie to the person for these charges to apply.
Stalking and surveillance. Following you, tracking your phone, monitoring your accounts, or installing hidden cameras in shared spaces can all be crimes. Every state criminalizes stalking, and federal law reaches stalking that uses mail, electronic communications, or interstate travel.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 2261A – Stalking Hidden recording devices in areas where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy can also violate federal wiretapping law, which prohibits intercepting oral communications without consent.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 US Code 2511 – Interception and Disclosure of Wire, Oral, or Electronic Communications Some states require all parties to consent to a recording; others allow it with one-party consent. A hidden camera in a bathroom or bedroom is illegal almost everywhere.
Ongoing verbal abuse. Isolated rude comments rarely clear the criminal threshold. A documented pattern of insults, slurs, or controlling intimidation can, especially when it supports a protective order petition. If the abuse targets your race, religion, sex, disability, national origin, or familial status, Fair Housing protections also come into play.
Start Documenting Before You Do Anything Else
Every remedy below depends on evidence. Without it, these proceedings become a credibility contest, and the roommate who kept records usually wins.
Save every text, email, voicemail, and social media message. Screenshot conversations instead of trusting the other person not to delete them. For in-person incidents, keep a contemporaneous log: date, time, what happened, who witnessed it, how it affected you. Contemporaneous means the same day, not reconstructed weeks later. Courts weight notes made close in time to events more heavily than memory.
Photograph property damage. Collect statements from neighbors or friends who saw incidents. If you later file a police report, this material becomes part of the official record; if you petition for a protective order, it’s what the judge reads. People who lose these cases are almost always the ones who waited too long to start.
When to Call the Police
File a report when harassment involves threats to your safety, stalking, property destruction, or any physical contact. Give a detailed account with dates and times, and bring your documentation.
Outcomes vary by jurisdiction and the seriousness of the conduct. Where there are threats of violence or stalking, officers may arrest the roommate or help you get an emergency protective order on the spot. Even if no charges are filed right away, the report creates an official record that supports a later protective order petition, eviction, or civil lawsuit.
Getting a Protective Order
A protective order (sometimes called a restraining order) is a court directive barring your roommate from contacting you, approaching you, or in some cases entering your shared residence. You start by filing a petition at your local courthouse that explains the harassment and why you need protection.
Most courts can issue a temporary order at that first hearing, before the other side has a chance to respond. The temporary order holds until a full hearing, where you present evidence and the respondent can contest the claims. If the judge finds the harassment credible and serious, a longer-term order can last from several months to multiple years. Violating one is itself a criminal offense and can lead to arrest, fines, and jail time.
Filing is usually free. Under the Violence Against Women Act, courts in covered jurisdictions cannot charge filing fees for protection orders tied to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, or stalking. Many states extend that waiver to civil harassment orders too, though some charge a fee for harassment orders unconnected to domestic violence. Attorney fees are separate if you hire one.
Whether you qualify for a domestic violence order or only a civil harassment order turns on how your state defines “household member.” Many states include current or former cohabitants in their domestic violence statutes, which means roommates can often petition for a domestic violence order without any romantic relationship. Check your state’s definition, because domestic violence orders typically carry stronger protections and faster processing than general harassment orders.
How Your Lease Controls What You Can Do
This is the piece most harassment advice skips, and it determines whether you can get the roommate out or only keep them away from you.
If You’re Both on the Same Lease
You’re legal equals to the landlord and the court. You cannot evict your co-tenant no matter how bad the behavior gets. Only the landlord has standing to pursue eviction, and the landlord must follow the full legal process, including written notice and a court filing if the tenant refuses to leave.
Your path is to document the harassment, report it to the landlord in writing with your evidence, and ask the landlord to begin eviction. If your lease prohibits conduct that interferes with other tenants’ peaceful enjoyment of the property, the harassment likely violates it. Under joint and several liability, which is standard in most multi-tenant leases, the landlord can evict one tenant without terminating the whole lease, though the specifics depend on jurisdiction and lease language.
If You Signed the Lease and They Sublet from You
You’re the master tenant, and you have a landlord-tenant relationship with your roommate. You can pursue eviction directly if they violate the sublease, but you must follow your state’s formal process: written notice, the required time to cure or vacate, and a court action if they don’t leave. Self-help evictions, meaning changing locks, moving belongings out, or shutting off utilities, are illegal in every state no matter how severe the harassment.
If You’re the Subtenant
Your options are narrower. You can file a police report, seek a protective order, or contact the property’s actual landlord, but you probably don’t have standing to force an eviction yourself.
Pushing the Landlord to Act
Landlords owe tenants a habitable living environment. When one tenant harasses another and the landlord knows but does nothing, that obligation may be in play. Notify your landlord in writing with detailed documentation, including police reports and your incident log. The written complaint itself matters: it creates the paper trail courts look for.
Some landlords move quickly once they understand their exposure. Others stall. If yours refuses to act despite documented lease-violating harassment, you may have grounds for a complaint with local housing authorities or an argument that the landlord has constructively breached the lease by failing to maintain a safe environment.
When the Harassment Is Discriminatory
If the harassment is motivated by race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status, or disability, the Fair Housing Act adds a separate layer of protection and shifts responsibility onto the landlord.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 US Code 3604 – Discrimination in the Sale or Rental of Housing and Other Prohibited Practices Under a 2016 HUD rule, landlords and property managers are directly liable for tenant-on-tenant harassment based on a protected characteristic when three conditions are met: the harassment created a hostile environment, the landlord knew or should have known, and the landlord had the power to stop it but failed to take prompt corrective action.5Federal Register. Quid Pro Quo and Hostile Environment Harassment and Liability for Discriminatory Housing Practices A landlord who ignores your written complaints about, say, racially motivated threats can face a federal fair housing complaint.
You can file with HUD or your local fair housing agency at no cost. Federal law also criminalizes using force or threats to interfere with someone’s housing rights because of a protected characteristic, with penalties up to one year in prison for threats alone, up to ten years if bodily injury results, and up to life if the conduct causes death.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 3631 – Violations; Penalties
Breaking Your Lease to Get Out Safely
Sometimes leaving is the safest option. The question is whether you can leave without an early termination penalty or losing your deposit.
If you live in federally assisted housing (public housing, Section 8, or other HUD-covered programs), VAWA bars landlords from penalizing you for being a victim of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, or stalking. You can request an emergency transfer to another unit, and the incident itself cannot be treated as a lease violation or grounds for ending your tenancy.7Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 34 USC 12491 – Housing Protections for Victims of Domestic Violence, Dating Violence, Sexual Assault, and Stalking You can also request a lease bifurcation, which removes the abusive person from the lease while keeping your tenancy intact.8HUD.gov. Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)
In private-market rentals, VAWA’s housing protections generally don’t apply. A growing number of states, though, have their own laws letting victims of domestic violence, stalking, or sexual assault terminate a lease early with written notice and supporting documentation. Requirements vary but typically include a copy of a protective order, a police report, or a signed statement from a qualified professional. Where these laws exist, the landlord cannot charge an early termination fee or report the broken lease as a standard breach.
Even without a specific statute, you may be able to argue constructive eviction: that the landlord’s inaction made the unit uninhabitable and justified your leaving. It’s harder to win without a statute behind it, but not uncommon in court. The argument lives or dies on the paper trail of written complaints that went unanswered.
Suing Your Roommate for Damages
If the harassment destroyed your property, forced you into emergency housing, or caused severe emotional distress, you may be able to recover money through a civil suit.
For straightforward financial losses (damaged belongings, stolen property, moving expenses to escape a dangerous situation), small claims court is the most accessible route. Maximum claim amounts run from $2,500 to $25,000 depending on the state, with most states capping claims at $5,000 or $10,000. You don’t need a lawyer, filing fees are modest, and cases move relatively fast. Bring receipts, photos, replacement estimates, and your harassment documentation.
An intentional infliction of emotional distress suit is a bigger undertaking. You must prove the conduct was outrageous (not just rude), that it was intentional or reckless, and that it caused severe emotional distress, meaning distress serious enough to affect your mental health. Courts have described “outrageous” as conduct that goes beyond all bounds of decency tolerated in a civilized society. Persistent threats of violence, sustained intimidation campaigns, or deliberate efforts to make you fear for your life can meet that standard. Hurt feelings from a difficult roommate will not. These cases typically require a lawyer and sometimes expert testimony about the psychological harm, and they’re worth pursuing only when the harassment was extreme and the consequences are documented.