Photo by Felipe Dupouy

Issue: Autumn 2005

Alumni Profile - Rhonda Saunders

Conscientious Crusader

Rhonda Saunders JD ’82 works to give victims their lives back. The tenacious deputy district attorney with Los Angeles County and internationally recognized expert in the areas of stalking and threat assessment devotes her working hours to fighting for tougher penalties against stalkers.

“Many people think stalking only involves celebrities, because that’s what the media covers, but the majority of domestic-violence situations actually evolve into stalking behavior,” Saunders says.

In fact, her work has benefited some of the most recognizable names in the entertainment industry: Madonna, Steven Spielberg, Gwyneth Paltrow. But the vast majority of cases that weave their way to Saunders involve ordinary people.

“Anybody can be a stalker, and anybody can be a stalking victim,” adds Saunders, who has prosecuted hundreds of stalking cases and handled at least a thousand others.

Reason enough for Saunders to be determined not only in court but also in the state’s capital. In 1991, following the doorstep killing of television actress Rebecca Schaeffer by a stalker, California enacted the first law on stalking, making the act a misdemeanor. But Saunders wanted more. She wanted to make the crime a felony. She wanted to extend the law to protect the victim’s family. She wanted better sentencing. So in 1992, Saunders appeared before the California Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I went up there and got kicked out,” Saunders says. “One person asked me, ’Why should we put someone in prison for being a pest?’ ”

Undaunted, Saunders returned. During her second visit – scheduled after a series of stalking-related crimes swept over Sacramento – her ideas sailed through. Today, the groundbreaking stalking laws she helped to write are emulated worldwide.

In 1994, she revised California’s stalking law so that a trial court could grant victims a 10-year restraining order (versus three with a civil restraining order). She also helped eliminate incarceration as a defense. (“Victims were telling me that after I had put their stalker in jail, that person would call them collect and threaten them by phone,” Saunders explains.) In 1997, she wrote a new law to facilitate emergency restraining orders in stalking and workplace-violence cases. In 2000, she increased the penalties for aggravated stalking.

Rhonda Saunders speaks at the annual conference of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals. Photo by Marie Johnson

Today the New York native is a relentless educator, training professionals at the Los Angeles Police Department and through the Secret Service’s training division. She recently launched an informational Web site at www.stalkingalert.com, and she worked with Court TV to tape a series of three documentaries, titled “Reasonable Fear,” based on her past stalking cases. This November, she’ll deliver a lecture at a government symposium on stalking in Kessel, Germany.

“When you see the damage stalking can do – when you talk to victims and their children and realize that some people truly have given up the hope of ever having a safe life.… That’s why I do this,” Saunders says.

– Rizza Barnes