Frankfurt 
Our client lives in Canada, where he met a woman from Berlin via the online dating platform Tinder. The two subsequently communicated by email and by phone over a period of six months but never met in the real world. The woman from Berlin became increasingly pushy. Among other things, she demanded that our client help her with job applications and throughout her English-language studies. Our client then ended the online relationship and broke off contact.
This triggered extreme online stalking behavior on the part of the woman. From then on, she sent our client over 100 emails per day from various email accounts and called him non-stop on various telephone numbers. Additionally, the woman contacted all of our client’s business contacts known to her and ridiculed him in front of his business contacts. This was done, among other things, by the woman sending our client’s business contacts private photos and private communications that he had previously sent to the woman online. The woman would not stop doing this until our client spoke to her again.
We applied to the Berlin Regional Court for an interim injunction against the woman to speedily take action against the damage to his reputation vis-à-vis our client’s business contacts.
The German Protection against Violence Act (Gewaltschutzgesetz, GewSchG) offers relevant protection against online stalking regarding unwanted contact by email and telephone. According to this law, the family court at the woman’s place of residence is responsible, which in this case was the district court of Tempelhof-Kreuzberg. There we filed for a temporary order of protective measures according to § 1 GewSchG.
The Berlin Regional Court (Case No. 27 O 280/18) has since issued the interim injunction to the extent requested. Likewise, the Tempelhof- Kreuzberg Local Court (Case No. 131 F 6928/18) has issued the requested interim injunction under the Protection against Violence Act. Violations of the temporary restraining order and/or the interim injunction would lead to high administrative fines or imprisonment. Due to these injunction court verdicts, the online stalking and the online defamation by the defendant have stopped.