Colorado Did It! HB26-1309 Has Passed.

The bill that required courts to see coercive control first has cleared the Colorado legislature. Here is what happens next — and why it matters everywhere.

Building of the State Capitol in Denver, Colorado.

I am writing this in the wee hours of in the morning, because I couldn’t wait to share the good news.

HB26-1309 has passed the Colorado legislature.

The bill that would have been easy to kill — the one four local bishops organized against, the one that asked courts to look at coercive control before applying a best-interests analysis, the one that named reproductive coercion and technological abuse and economic control as domestic violence — passed.

It now goes to Governor Jared Polis for signature. If signed, it becomes law. The effective date is August 12, 2026.

Take a moment with that. Then keep reading, because the work is not finished.

What Just Happened

HB26-1309, titled “Abuse in Cases of Separation,” passed both chambers of the Colorado General Assembly before the session’s scheduled adjournment on May 13, 2026. It was sponsored by Representative Meg Froelich, Representative Tammy Story, and Senator Katie Wallace.

In practical terms, here is what Colorado family courts will be required to do once this law takes effect.

Before applying the best-interests-of-the-child standard — the framework that has governed custody decisions for decades — a court must first determine whether a party has committed domestic violence. If the court finds domestic violence by a preponderance of the evidence, a legal presumption activates: it is presumed not to be in the child’s best interests to award that parent custody.

The burden shifts. For the first time in Colorado, a parent found to have committed coercive control does not simply have that history weighed as one factor among many. They have to actively rebut a legal presumption against them.

That is a structural change. It is not incremental. It is the kind of shift that takes years of advocacy, research, and survivor testimony to produce — and Colorado produced it.

What This Means for Survivors

If you have been through family court as a survivor of coercive control, you already know the specific cruelty that this bill addresses. You know what it is to walk into a courtroom with years of documented pattern behavior — the monitoring, the isolation, the financial control, the threats — and watch it be treated as context rather than evidence. You know what it is to have a judge apply a best-interests analysis to a situation where the abuser’s interest in controlling you never stopped operating. It simply moved into a new venue.

HB26-1309 does not fix the family court system. It does not guarantee outcomes. Judges still have discretion. The presumption is rebuttable. Implementation will be uneven, and the training gap among judicial officers and court-appointed professionals is real and will take time to close.

But it changes the question the court is required to ask first. And changing the first question changes everything that follows.

After many years of direct work with survivors of coercive control — including the most severe and treatment-resistant presentations — I can tell you that the post-separation period is consistently the most dangerous. The courtroom becomes the new theater of control. Vexatious litigation, weaponized parenting time, financial attrition — these are not edge cases in the population I work with. They are the norm.

Legislation that requires courts to see the pattern before they weigh the factors is not a small thing. For the survivors who will walk into Colorado family courts after August 12, 2026, it may be the difference between being believed and not being believed in the room that determines their children’s lives.

What This Means for Children

Colorado’s own 2024 domestic violence fatality report documented eight children killed as collateral victims of domestic violence in a single year (See my previous post Colorado Is About to Vote on a Coercive Control Bill. Here's What's at Stake.) Every one of them was under the age of eight. Five were killed during active custody disputes.

Piqui Andressian was five years old when his father killed him during a custody dispute in California in 2017, despite his mother’s warnings to the court. Greyson Kessler was four years old when his father killed him during court-ordered visitation in Florida in 2021, while his mother’s domestic violence injunction sat unanswered.

These children died in the gap between what a protective parent knew and what the court was equipped to see. HB26-1309 is Colorado’s attempt to close that gap. It will not close it completely. But it narrows it in ways that matter.

What the Opposition Got Wrong

The Colorado Catholic Conference organized against this bill. Four bishops issued a joint letter urging the faithful to call their senators and vote no. Their arguments — that the coercive control definition was too broad, that the reproductive coercion provision threatened religious parental rights — were reported here in full when the bill was under consideration.

Those arguments did not prevail. And it is worth sitting with why.

The legislators who voted for this bill were not dismissing the bishops’ concerns. They were weighing them against something heavier: the documented reality that courts have been systematically failing to protect survivors and children from abuse perpetrators who present well. The bishops argued from the margin cases — the interpretive edges of a broad definition. The bill’s supporters argued from the center — the thousands of survivors in Colorado courts right now whose coercive control history is being treated as one factor among many in a framework that was not built to see it.

The margin cases are real and deserve careful judicial attention. But they are not a reason to leave the center unprotected.

A Note on Common Ground

Lucy, a subscriber to Coercive Control, responded to my original article with something worth holding space for. She wrote that this looked like two groups — women’s and children’s safety advocates, and the Catholic Church — who essentially share the same goals but have not listened to each other enough to find consensus.

She is right. And I want to honor that observation properly.

The bishops’ letter represented an institutional position. It does not represent the full reality of what Catholics — and Catholic women in particular — are doing for survivors of coercive control around the world.

I want to recognize the outstanding work of countless Catholic nuns who are often the only source of support for survivors in remote and under-resourced communities. They are frequently the only people documenting the lived reality of victim-survivors of coercive control. Their work is quiet, consistent, and profound.

Among them is Sister Regy Augustine, a Medical Mission Sister who is also a practicing attorney representing women in abuse cases and an advocate across four nongovernmental organizations. Speaking at the 69th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, she said, “Patriarchal norms and attitudes continue to perpetuate gender inequality and normalize violence against women […] with devastating physical and mental health effects on women, contributing negatively to national and social health.”

That is not the voice of an institution opposing protective legislation. That is the voice of a woman inside a religious tradition, doing the same work coercive control legislation advocates do, in places most of us will never reach.

The Catholic Church is multifaceted. The bishops’ letter was one expression of institutional authority. Sister Regy Augustine and the women alongside her are another expression of the same tradition — and it is the expression that has been in the room with survivors, in courtrooms, in shelters, and at the United Nations, making the case that coercive control destroys lives and that the structures enabling it must change.

To learn more about the sisters’ impact, visit Global Sisters Report.

What Comes Next

The bill now awaits Governor Polis’s signature. There is no indication he will not sign it.

Once signed, the effective date is August 12, 2026. Between now and then, the work is implementation. Colorado courts, judicial officers, family law attorneys, and court-appointed mental health professionals will need to understand what coercive control actually looks like — not in its most obvious physical form, but in the pattern-based, non-incident form that this bill was designed to address.

That training gap is the next frontier. Legislation names the pattern. Implementation requires people who know how to see it.

I, for one, will be watching.

Why This Matters Beyond Colorado

HB26-1309 is now a legislative model. A state that passed a law requiring courts to assess coercive control before applying a best-interests analysis — with evidentiary standards, written judicial findings, and a presumption that shifts the burden onto the party found to have committed abuse. Other state legislatures will look at it.

The arguments used to oppose it will travel too. They already have — versions of the “definition too broad” and “parental rights at risk” arguments have been used against coercive control legislation in other jurisdictions. Advocates in other states now have a counter-record: Colorado weighed those arguments and passed the bill anyway.

The strategic objective behind my support of this bill has always been institutional velocity: ensuring Colorado’s passage establishes the precedent required to mobilize the next jurisdiction. And the one after that. The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index exists to track exactly this progress. I am excited to update the index and add HB26-1309 to Colorado’s existing laws HB21-1099 (2021) defining domestic abuse to include coercion and SB25-116 which adds coercive control as a factor in spousal support determinations.

After many years of working with survivors who walked into courtrooms that were not equipped to protect them, I allow myself this morning to feel something that does not come easily in this work.

Hope.