Colorado Criminal Lawyer BlogDomestic Violence Under Colorado Law: What Is It Exactly? (2026)
Domestic Violence Under Colorado Law: What Is It Exactly? (2026)
By H. Michael Steinberg, A Colorado criminal defense lawyer practicing Colorado Criminal Law from both sides for over 40 years.
Introduction:
In Colorado, domestic violence is defined broadly to include not just physical harm, but also threats and acts of control or intimidation against someone in an intimate relationship.
The intimate relationship component may not be clear or easy to understand, as that term has evolved in the Colorado court system, and this article seeks to delve into the evolution of the meaning of the intimate relationship term of art in the law.
One possible key to defending a charge of domestic violence and defeating the intimate relationship element – necessary under Colorado law to be charged with domestic violence – is to understand the definition of intimate relationship as it has been defined in Colorado cases that interpret statutory law.
The law covers a wide range of behaviors and has significant legal consequences for those found guilty of domestic violence.
A conviction for a crime that is found to have been an act of domestic violence. The consequences of the “domestic violence tag” are critical because the consequences can be extraordinarily serious.
The Potential Consequences Of A Conviction With The Domestic Violence Enhancer
A domestic-violence designation can substantially change what happens to an otherwise ordinary misdemeanor assault case. Some of the consequences of the application of being found guilty of an act of domestic violence are:
- Mandatory protection orders,
- No-contact conditions,
- Loss of the right to bear firearms (Federal firearm prohibitions create lifetime restrictions extending beyond state penalties, potentially affecting careers in law enforcement or security fields).
- Domestic-violence mandatory evaluations and treatment,
- Strict probation conditions related to domestic violence,
- Future domestic-violence convictions with enhanced punitive sentencing (potential habitual DV consequences),
- Record sealing ineligibility.
Additional Potential Consequences Of A Conviction With The Domestic Violence Enhancer
- Professional licensing – A Defendant may face suspension or revocation, particularly in healthcare, education, and legal fields where domestic violence convictions raise fitness concerns for roles involving public trust.
- Immigration consequences can be severe for non-citizens, as domestic violence convictions may constitute grounds for deportation or inadmissibility under federal law.
- Employment limitations may also emerge from background checks revealing domestic violence convictions, because many employers view violent crime history as a workplace safety risk.
- Housing restrictions may also occur when landlords reject rental applications based on violent crime convictions during tenant screening processes.
The Definition of Domestic Violence Under Colorado Law
The definition of domestic violence in Colorado is found in Colorado Revised Statutes (C.R.S.) § 18-6-800.3. Under Colorado law, domestic violence is defined as:
“An act or threatened act of violence upon a person with whom the actor is or has been involved in an intimate relationship.”
There Are Two Key Elements Of Domestic Violence Under Colorado Law
One – Acts or Threatened Acts
18-6-800.3(1): “Domestic violence” means an act or threatened act of violence upon a person with whom the actor is or has been involved in an intimate relationship.
“Domestic violence” also includes any other crime against a person, or against property, … when used as a method of coercion, control, punishment, intimidation, or revenge directed against a person with whom the actor is or has been involved in an intimate relationship.
- Includes actual physical harm or threats of harm.
- Encompasses verbal, emotional, or psychological threats if they involve violence or the threat of violence. Examples include:
- Physical assault (e.g., hitting, slapping, punching),
- Verbal threats of harm,
- Destruction of property (e.g., breaking a partner’s phone),
- Harming or threatening to harm pets,
- Stalking or harassment.
- Any other crime against a person or property, including animals, when used as a method of coercion, control, punishment, intimidation, or revenge directed toward a person with whom the actor has had an intimate relationship.
Two – An Intimate Relationship
18-6-800.3(2): “Intimate relationship” means a relationship between spouses, former spouses, past or present unmarried couples, or persons who are both the parents of the same child regardless of whether the persons have been married or have lived together at any time.
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- The law defines an intimate relationship as a relationship between spouses, former spouses, past or present unmarried couples, or parents of the same child, regardless of marital status or cohabitation.
Sidebar – Domestic Violence Is A “Sentence Enhancer” – Not A Separate Criminal Charge
- It is important to make clear that domestic violence is not a separate criminal charge in Colorado. Instead, it is a “sentence enhancer” that can be added to other crimes if the offense meets the statutory definition.
- For example, the police are required to make a mandatory arrest if they have probable cause to believe domestic violence has occurred.
- Protection orders, such as no-contact orders with the accused ordered to leave his or her home (restraining orders), are mandatory and almost always issued in these cases.
- Also mandatory is the requirement of a domestic violence evaluation and treatment – see the following section.
C.R.S. § 18-6-801 — Domestic Violence Sentencing Requirements – Mandatory treatment program and evaluation (§ 18-6-801(1))
“Any person who is convicted of any crime, the underlying factual basis of which has been found by the court on the record to include an act of domestic violence, as defined in section 18-6-800.3(1), or any crime against property… when such crime is used as a method of coercion, control, punishment, intimidation, or revenge…
shall be ordered to complete a treatment program and a treatment evaluation that conform with the standards adopted by the domestic violence offender management board as required by section 16-11.8-103(4).”
When Read Together – Two Colorado Cases – People v. Disher (2010) And People v. Fonseca (2026)…
Provide The Necessary Analysis To Understand The Term Intimate Relationship Under Colorado’s Domestic Violence Statute, C.R.S. § 18-6-800.3(2)
Case 1: People v. Disher (2010)
People v Disher is the seminal case for defining the outline of the term intimate relationship. The case enumerates three factors as guideposts for the fact-finder.
- The duration of the relationship,
- The nature/type of the relationship,
- And the frequency of interaction in the relationship,
This case does not provide an exclusive checklist. Rather, it provides that a Colorado jury may weigh objective conduct (such as repeated in-person contact, physical intimacy, cuddling, and escalating emotional investment) over either party’s subjective labelingtical effect of the case was to narrow the room defendants have to argue, as a matter of law, that a short or informally labeled relationship cannot support a domestic violence charge.
Case 2: People v. Fonseca (2026)
The 2026 case of People v. Fonseca, while not announcing a new legal test, applies the Disher cases’ non-exhaustive, totality-of-the-circumstances framework and forecloses two arguments that Disher left open:
1. That a relationship’s brevity is dispositive against a finding of intimacy, and that the parties’ own contemporaneous or after-the-fact labels for the relationship control the analysis.
Fonseca extends, the Colorado Supreme Court’s construction of “intimate relationship” under C.R.S. § 18-6-800.3(2) as first articulated in Disher, and how courts will continue to evaluate short-duration, ambiguously-labeled relationships in domestic violence prosecutions going forward.
The statute does not define “unmarried couple” or otherwise specify what conduct or characteristics make a relationship “intimate” short of marriage, former marriage, or shared parentage. That interpretive gap is what has generated the case law discussed below.
A Closer Look At These Two Critical Cases:
The Controlling Precedent: People v. Disher (2010)
People v. Disher, 224 P.3d 254 (Colo. 2010) (No. 07SC1088), was a case of first impression for the Colorado Supreme Court. The trial court had excluded evidence offered to support a domestic-violence sentence enhancer on the theory that the relationship between the defendant and the witness, M.P., was not sufficiently “intimate” absent proof of a sexual relationship.
The court of appeals affirmed. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve whether a sexual relationship is a prerequisite to an “intimate relationship” under § 18-6-800.3(2).
Sexual Contact Is Not Required
The Supreme Court reversed, holding that evidence of a sexual relationship is not necessary to establish an “intimate relationship” for domestic-violence purposes. The Court reasoned textually that “intimate” and “sexual” are not synonymous: “intimate” means “marked by close acquaintance, association, or familiarity,” a broader concept than sexual involvement.
The Court also observed that the General Assembly knows how to require sexual conduct expressly when it intends to — (as it does elsewhere in Title 18) — but did not do so here. The statute’s own text, listing spouses, former spouses, unmarried couples, and co-parents without a sexual-conduct qualifier, reinforces that conclusion.
The Three-Factor, Non-Exhaustive Test Revisited
To give content to “intimate relationship” without a sexual-conduct requirement, the Court identified three factors relevant to the inquiry, while expressly declining to make the list exhaustive or to assign the factors relative weight:
- The length of time the relationship has existed or did exist;
- The nature or type of the relationship; and
- The frequency of interaction between the parties.
The Court set the outer boundary of the definition in the other direction as well, holding that an “intimate relationship” does not include “mere social or business acquaintances and friends” — some degree of romantic attachment, or shared parental status, remains necessary.
However, Dishert left two related questions unresolved: how brief a relationship can be and still qualify, and whether the parties’ own characterization of the relationship (as opposed to their conduct) bears on, or controls, the analysis.
Fonseca resolved both.
The Clarifying Follow-up Case: People v. Fonseca (2026) – Holding and Reasoning on “Intimate Relationship”
Writing for a unanimous panel, Judge Elizabeth Harris applied Disher’s framework as “an objective, fact-intensive inquiry based on the totality of the evidence,” and expressly rejected any bright-line rule keyed to duration or frequency: neither the relationship’s duration nor the frequency of contacts is dispositive.
The Court held that four in-person interactions over three weeks — coupled with sexual contact at the outset, recurring casual companionship, and cuddling the night before the assault — could support a rational jury’s finding of an intimate relationship when the evidence is viewed holistically, notwithstanding the relationships short lifespan.
The Court also rejected the argument that the absence of “traditional dating activities,” or the victim’s own tentative label (“on the verge of … becoming something”), precluded a finding of intimacy.
As the Court put it,
“[n]o case appears to support the position that parties are in an intimate relationship only if they engage in what might be considered traditional dating activities.”
The Court emphasized that labels are not conclusive and that the objective conduct and trajectory of the relationship matter more than what either party called it — including Fonseca’s own post hoc denial that he had described the relationship as “locked in.”
Notably, the court supplied a policy rationale that went beyond Disher’s text:
…allowing a defendant to minimize or re-characterize a relationship after committing an act of violence early in that relationship would undermine the statute’s protective purpose.
This reasoning addresses a fact pattern Disher did not confront — violence occurring near the outset of a relationship, before its trajectory or label has fully solidified — and forecloses a defense strategy of using the relationship’s youth against the domestic-violence enhancement.
Analysis: How Fonseca Relates to Disher
Doctrinally, Fonseca is best understood as an application and incremental extension of Disher rather than a departure from it:
Same framework, no new factors.
Fonseca does not add to or subtract from Disher’s three factors (duration, nature/type, frequency). It reaffirms that the list is non-exhaustive and that no single factor is dispositive — a point Disher stated but did not need to test against a genuinely short relationship.
Resolves the duration question left open by Disher.
Disher involved an “exclusive dating relationship” of unspecified but presumably more conventional duration; it did not test how little time and how few contacts could suffice. Fonseca supplies that answer: three to four in-person meetings over roughly three weeks can be enough when the qualitative content of those meetings (sexual contact, cuddling, escalating emotional description) is substantial.
Adds a labeling rule Disher did not need to reach.
Disher rejected a sexual-conduct requirement but did not address whether the parties’ subjective characterization of the relationship (as opposed to objective indicia) affects the analysis.
Fonseca holds that labels — including a defendant’s post hoc denial of a label, or a victim’s tentative, hedging description — are evidence for the fact-finder to weigh, not a threshold gatekeeping requirement or a defense trump card.
Summary and Conclusion
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“Intimate relationship” is defined by statute, but Colorado courts have had to decide what actually counts — and as of August 2026, the test is an objective, fact-intensive look at the whole relationship, not a checklist and not the label the parties themselves used. |
The combined effect of Disher and Fonseca is that the “intimate relationship” element is now difficult to defeat as a matter of law on either of the two grounds most readily available to a defendant — absence of sex (foreclosed by Disher) and brevity or ambiguity of the relationship (foreclosed by Fonseca) — and instead sits with the jury under a deferential, totality-of-the-circumstances, sufficiency-of-the-evidence standard.
A defense challenge to the intimate-relationship element is now much more likely to be framed, and to succeed, as an evidentiary/credibility argument at trial than as a legal-sufficiency argument on appeal.
Why This Matters If You’re Facing a Colorado Domestic Violence Charge
The domestic violence label in Colorado isn’t a separate crime — it’s a sentence enhancer that attaches to an underlying offense and triggers mandatory treatment requirements, and as noted above, there are very serious collateral consequences that result if you are found guilty of an act of domestic violence. Whether it attaches often turns entirely on this one contested element of the underlying crime and whether the State can prove there was an intimate relationship.
After Fonseca, a few things follow for anyone building a defense:
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The Bottom Line A statute can define a term and still leave real questions unanswered. Colorado’s appellate courts have now told us twice that “intimate relationship” is decided on the whole picture, not a checklist — which means these cases are won or lost on the specific facts, not on labels. |
In over 40 years of defending domestic violence cases across the Denver metro area, I’ve seen the “intimate relationship” element decide cases that had nothing to do with whether the underlying conduct occurred. Getting the relationship evidence right — and knowing exactly how courts like the one in Fonseca are weighing it right now — can be the difference between a standard conviction and one that carries a mandatory domestic violence designation.
Facing a Domestic Violence Charge in Colorado?
If you’ve been charged with a crime carrying a domestic violence designation and you believe the relationship element doesn’t hold up, contact the Law Office of H. Michael Steinberg. With more than 40 years of Colorado criminal defense experience, I can evaluate whether the facts of your relationship actually meet the legal standard — and build your defense accordingly.
This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice or create an attorney-client relationship. Every case depends on its specific facts — consult a licensed Colorado criminal defense attorney about your situation.
Colorado Criminal Law –Domestic Violence Under Colorado Law: What Is It Exactly? (2026)
The reader is alerted that Colorado criminal law, like criminal law in every state and at the Federal level, changes constantly. The article appearing above was accurate when it was drafted, but it cannot account for changes occurring after it was uploaded.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: H. Michael Steinberg – Email the Author at: hmsteinberg@hotmail.com
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