When a 16-year-old Glenrock High School student approached Wyoming lawmakers Tuesday at the state Capitol to ask for harsher penalties for adults who stalk minors, state leaders agreed to look into it.
The Management Council, which is the Wyoming Legislature’s administrative arm, met Tuesday to consider whether the Judiciary Committee should research ways to bolster Wyoming’s stalking laws, among other scheduling decisions.
The council directed the Senate and House Judiciary Committee chairmen to take on the topic, and they agreed, Chair Art Washut, R-Casper, confirmed to Cowboy State Daily.
At the meeting, 16-year-old stalking victim Gillian Holman shared her story of being stalked by a 41-year-old woman for a year.
Marcie Smith stalked Gillian and Gillian’s boyfriend Preston Sorensen for nearly a year, according to court documents, interviews with the families and case evidence.
Smith was sentenced to two years’ probation last month and fined $1,390.
Those months of not knowing who was trying to ruin Gillian’s life were a nightmare, Gillian said Tuesday.
At one point the stalker tried convincing Gillian’s family that she was being sexually inappropriate with boys at school and that they’d begun to think of her as a sexual commodity, according to screenshots and interviews with the Holman family.
Gillian endured a “constant stream of messages and a never-ending feeling of being on edge,” she said Tuesday.
In October 2024, Gillian learned that the person behind the messages was Marcie Smith, the mother of one of Gillian’s classmates, she said.
The girl assumed at the time that because she’s a minor and Smith is an adult, “she’s going to be in so much trouble,” Gillian told the council.
But Smith was not in so much trouble: she received a plea agreement for two counts of misdemeanor stalking and was sentenced to probation. The breadth of an evidentiary warrant in the case had given Smith’s defense leverage to challenge law enforcement’s main body of evidence – so the families agreed to the lighter sentence, the Holman family told Cowboy State Daily.
Washut sat by Gillian as she presented her story.
House Speaker Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, congratulated Gillian for “your courage, and taking the time to come down here.” He said he’s looking forward to helping her and believes Washut is as well.
Sen Brian Boner, R-Douglas, sent a letter to the council ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, urging it to set the topic for the year’s lawmaking agenda.
The Bill The Senate Shot Down
Gillian said that House Bill 189, which the state Senate killed in a 26-4 vote Feb. 21, would have given her family and other families “true justice” in this area.
Senate Majority Floor Leader Tara Nethercott, R-Cheyenne, questioned whether the bill would have prevented the crime.
Gillian Holman clarified that it wouldn’t have, since it didn’t surface for a vote until this year while her stalking case started in November 2023. But it may have helped others, Gillian ventured.
HB 189 had sought to make it a felony for adults to text, write or speak obscenities to minors or people “purported to be” minors more than four years their junior.
The bill would only have criminalized such communications when the adult sent them “for the purpose of sexual gratification.” It’s not clear if Marcie Smith sent sexualized texts to Gillian Holman and Preston Sorensen for a purpose other than to harass them.
For example, she urged Sorensen (who was then 15) to shoot a photograph of himself in his underwear – but said it was for her daughter, not for her, the screenshots show. She asked at one point if he had a "boner" while at a dance, and made other sexual references, according to interviews.
Acting as a teenage boy, Smith texted Holman, “I’d tap that ass,” according to screenshots and interviews with the family.
HB 189 had numerous other issues. Detractors in the Senate who voted it down Feb. 21 called it overbroad, questioned why it furnished its own definition of obscenity rather than relying on the one already in Wyoming law and vetted by the U.S. Supreme Court, and wondered if Wyoming’s existing laws were already sufficient to tackle the issue.
Nethercott worried at the time that the bill’s wording was unconstitutional, which could let a “bad” person off the hook after a successful court challenge.
Gillian’s mother Cathy Holman clarified in a Tuesday text to Cowboy State Daily that the family doesn’t advocate the exact wording of HB 189 but hopes lawmakers will take another look at its mission in the coming months.
“We understand why it didn’t pass,” said Cathy. “It needs more work. But we want to encourage our legislators to take the time to do that.”
Let’s Look Closely
In a later statement to the council and the public Tuesday, Nethercott again urged lawmakers to reflect before crafting more laws.
She said she respects prosecutors across Wyoming and understands they review complex, unique facts before choosing which crimes to charge – but she wondered aloud if Wyoming’s law against sexual exploitation of minors could have been applied in this case.
The case prosecutor Converse County Deputy Attorney Nate Shumway declined Tuesday to comment, reiterating that his office doesn’t comment to the media on its cases.
Grey Area Here
The statute Nethercott referenced makes it a felony for someone to cause, induce, entice or coerce a child to engage in sexual conduct.
“Sexual conduct” there is defined as patently offensive representations or descriptions of sexual acts, sado-masochistic abuse, or patently offensive representations of “masturbation, excretory functions, or lewd exhibitions of the genitals.”
Once again, it is uncertain if a call for a boy to appear in his underwear falls under this criminal definition.
Preston Sorensen’s mom Brandi said that felony charge doesn’t seem to fit Smith’s conduct toward her son.
“It’s sort of a grey area to me. It does not fit exactly,” said Brandi, noting that her son wasn’t asked to portray any sexual act – just to appear in his underwear.
It’s still “definitely” worth it to Brandi, for lawmakers to comb through these laws in light of this case, she said.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
