Jennifer Warner v. Jeffrey Espitia et al.
No. S25G1354
Supreme Court of Georgia
June 30, 2026
On Writ of Certiorari from the Court of Appeals No. A25A0095 Argued: May 5, 2026
WARREN, Presiding Justice.
In June 2023, Jeffrey Espitia filed a petition for contempt in Cоbb County Superior Court, alleging that his ex-wife Jennifer Warner, with whom he has two children, was in arrears in her child support payments. Espitia also filed notices with the Georgia Department of Human Services (“DHS”) claiming that Warner was in arrears. The Cobb County court ultimately determined that Warner’s child support payments were paid in full, such that she was not in contempt, and that Espitia’s petition was “frivolous.” Warner then filed in Paulding County Superior Court a complaint against Espitia and his fiancée, Krystal Kriewaldt, alleging, among other things, that they conspired with each other to file the false petition аnd DHS notices, which constituted a civil violation of the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (“RICO”) Act pursuant to
As explained below, an analysis of the text and surrounding context of the Georgia RICO Act shows that the Act does not exclude from its reach individuals who have engaged in racketeering activity within the context of a “domestic dispute.” Because this is the only plausible construction of the plain language of the Act, the Court of Appeals should not have gone on to consider whether such a construction would produce results that, in the court’s view, were “unreasonable or absurd.” We therefore vacate the Court of Appeals’s opinion and remand the case for the court to consider the parties’ remaining arguments as to whether thе trial court properly dismissed Warner’s complaint.
1. Factual Background
As summarized by the Court of Appeals:
[T]he record demonstrates that Warner and Espitia divorced in 2009 and that the couple’s two children resided with Espitia and his fiancée, Kriewaldt. A January 2023 child support consent order, entered by the Superior Court of Cobb County (the “Cobb County court”), required Warner to pay, initially, $450 per month to Espitia with an increase to $550 per month in November 2023. The child support order also noted that Warner was in arrears in the amount of $7,500 as of July 1, 2022, and that she was required to pay Espitia an additional $100 per month until the arrearage was satisfied in full.
In June 2023, Espitia, with Kriewaldt’s assistance, filed a petition for contempt in the Cobb
County court, alleging that Warner was in arrears in the amount of $11,774.58. [Around the same time, Espitia filed a notice with DHS claiming that Warner was in arrears; he filed another DHS notice in October 2023.1] At an October 25, 2023 hearing on Espitia’s petition for contempt, Espitia admitted that he was “ignorant” as to whether Warner was in arrears or the amount she was in arrears, but added that he did not “intentionally false[ly] swear” because he “truly believed” Kriewaldt’s calculation of the alleged arrearage and mistakenly thought that other еxpenses, in addition to child support, were in arrears. As a result, Espitia characterized the filings as “100 percent a mistake.” After the hearing, the Cobb County court entered an order that declined to hold Warner in contempt and, instead, awarded attorney fees to Warner against Espitia. As part of its order, the Cobb County court concluded that Espitia’s contempt petition had “such a complete absence of any justiciable issue of law or fact … that it could not reasonably be believed that a court would find [Warner] in contempt….” The Cobb County court further found thаt
the claims in [Espitia’s] Petition were substantially frivolous, substantially groundless, and substantially vexatious. The [c]ourt [found] that the evidence showed the instant
case was initiated with the intention to harass and intimidate [Warner]. [Espitia] testified under oath that he did not know the disputed child support payments, which had been adjudicated by [a] prior Consent Final Order, were res judicata. He further testified that [Kriewaldt] calculated the alleged arrearages in the Petition. The [c]ourt [did] not find these arguments credible or persuasive if true.
Thereafter, armed with the Cobb County court’s order, Warner filed the present complaint alleging causes of action for filing false documents, violations of the Georgia RICO Act, punitive damages, and attorney fees.2 The defendants moved to dismiss Warner’s complaint, arguing that Warner’s claim was barred by res judicata and because: (1) it vio-
Following a hearing, the trial court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss. Specifiсally, the trial court found that the predicate acts underlying Warner’s RICO claim—filing of false statements and writings (
Warner, 375 Ga. App. at 807–08 (footnotes omitted).
Warner appealed, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. See Warner, 375 Ga. App. at 814. Although the Court of Appeals acknowledged that “Warner’s complaint identifie[d] two false statement statutes—codified at
Warner timely filed a petition for certiorari, arguing, among other things, that the Court of Appeals erred by concluding that her complaint exceeded the scope of the Georgia RICO Act. We granted the petition.5
2. Analysis
We begin with the well-settled standard of review that applies to a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. Such a motion
should not be sustained unless (1) the allegations of the complaint disclose with certainty that the claimant would not be entitled to relief under any state of provable facts asserted in support thereof; and (2) the movant establishes that the claimant could not
possibly introduce evidence within the framework of the complaint sufficient to warrant a grant of the relief sought.
Williams v. DeKalb County, 308 Ga. 265, 270 (2020) (quotation marks omitted). See also
Here, the Court of Appeals concluded that Warner could not be entitled to relief under any state of provable facts asserted in support of her claim that Espitia and Kriewaldt violated
(a) An Analysis of the Text and Context of the Georgia RICO Act Does Not Support the Court of Appeals’s Conclusion.
“When we consider the meaning of a statute, we must presume that the General Assembly meant what it said and said what it meant.” Deal v. Coleman, 294 Ga. 170, 172 (2013) (quotation marks omitted). “To that end, we must afford the statutory text its plain and ordinary meaning, we must view the statutory text in the context in which it appears, and we must read the statutory text in its most natural and reasonable way, as an ordinary speaker of the English language would.” Id. at 172–73 (cleaned up).
The text of the Georgia RICO Act, which was first enacted in 1980 and has been amended several times since, has never contained language that expressly limits its application to particular sorts of “disputes”—much less language that expressly excludes from its reach individuals who have engaged in racketeering activity within the context of a “domestic dispute.” See, e.g., Ga. L. 1980 at 405; Ga. L. 1982 at 1385; Ga. L. 1984 at 22; Ga. L. 1997 at 672; Ga. L. 2015 at 693. Indeed, as discussed more below, the text of the Act indicates that it applies to anyone who violates its terms through the commission of acts involving any crime in a long and varied list of criminal offenses.
To begin, the plain language of
In addition, the Georgia RICO Act broadly defines “‘[p]attern of racketeering activity’” as “[e]ngaging in at least two acts of racketeering activity in furtherance of one or more incidents, schemes, or transactions that have the same or similar intents, results, accomplices, victims, or methods of commission or otherwise are interrelated by distinguishing characteristics and are not isolated incidents …” or “[e]ngaging in any one or more acts of domestic terrorism as described in Code Section
The provision of the Georgia RICO Act that allows for civil remedies similarly contains no indication that such remedies are not available when the civil claim alleges that a defendant has engaged in racketeering activity in the context of a “domestic dispute.” See
Moreover, the Georgia RICO Act explicitly sets forth the General Assembly’s intent to combat “the increasing sophistication of various criminal elements and the increasing extent to which the state and its citizens are harmed as a result of the activities of these elements”; to impose sanctions “against those who violate” the Act; and “to provide compensation to persons injured or aggrieved by such violations.”
In sum, the broadly applicable text of the Georgia RICO Act to “any person” who engages in a pattern of racketeering activity by committing acts involving any crime in a varied list of predicate offenses, combined with thе fact that the text of the Act does not expressly exclude racketeering activity arising from a “domestic dispute,” strongly supports that no such categorical exclusion exists. See, e.g., Clark v. State, 321 Ga. 35, 43–44 (2025) (holding that because nothing in the text of a statute provided a remedy for the failure to comply with the statute, the statute did not automatically entitle the defendant to the remedy he sought); McKinney v. State, 318 Ga. 566, 569–70 (2024) (concluding that a criminal statute did not contain a certain requirement, partly because the text of the statute contained no such requirement).
Statutory context also supports this conсlusion. Indeed, the legislature has expressly carved out limitations on criminal and civil liability in other provisions of the Criminal Code, but it included no such limitations in the Georgia RICO Act. See, e.g.,
(b) Nothing in the Court of Appeals’s Analysis Affords a Basis to Depart from the Statutory Text.
The Court of Appeals’s opinion in this case did not engage in the sort of analysis of the Georgia RICO Act’s text that we conducted above. Rather, the court quoted various provisions of the Act; noted that “[f]ederal courts routinely reject RICO claims within the context of domestic disputes” and that this lawsuit did not comport with the Georgia RICO Act’s “original purpose of combatting organized crime”; and then concluded that Warner’s complaint failed to state a claim upon which relief can be granted
To begin, “a statute draws its meaning from its text.” Clark, 321 Ga. at 40 (quotation marks omitted). That statutory construction centers on an analysis of the statute’s text, “rather than whatever policy goal we imagine the statute to have been intended to serve.” State v. Phillips, 323 Ga. 125, 129 (2025). See also, e.g., State v. Greathouse, 323 Ga. 99, 101–02 (2025); Deal, 294 Ga. at 172–73. Although the Court of Appeals set out this principle of statutory construction at the outset of its opinion, it did not engage in any meaningful analysis of the text of the Georgia RICO Act. See Warner, 375 Ga. App. at 809–13.
Next, although we have held that federal authority may be persuasive in interpreting the Gеorgia RICO Act, see Williams General Corporation v. Stone, 279 Ga. 428, 430 (2005), the federal RICO cases on which the Court of Appeals relied do not stand for the proposition that domestic cases are categorically excluded from the federal RICO Act. Instead, the federal cases that the Court of Appeals cited noted that the fact patterns of most domestic cases are not the sort of fact patterns that typically support a federal RICO claim and then, after conducting an analysis as to whether the plaintiffs sufficiently pled such a claim under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), held that the claim was not sufficient. See Cohen v. Cohen, 993 F. Supp. 2d 414, 423 (2014) (noting that “domestic relations disputes are rarely the nebulae from which viable civil RICO claims coalesce” and then analyzing at length whether the plaintiff had standing to bring her RICO claims and whether she sufficiently pled the claims before deter-
The Court of Appeals’s reliance on the Georgia RICO Act’s “original purpose of combatting organized crime” was similarly misplaced. Warner, 375 Ga. App. at 814. Although the first version of
Finally, the Court of Appeals erred in reaching an absurdity analysis and predicating its legal conclusion on it. See Warner, 375 Ga. App. at 814. We have explained that courts “may construe statutes to avoid absurd results,” Riley v. State, 305 Ga. 163, 168 (2019), but that construction must flow from an аnalysis of the statutory text. The “absurdity doctrine”—one of many canons of construction courts might apply in construing statutory text—is available as a tool of construction only when an analysis of the text of a statute indicates that there is more than one plausible interpretation as to the meaning of the text. That is to say, when a court considers statutory text—using other tools of statutory construction to determine what the text might mean—and concludes that its textual analysis yields competing constructions of nearly equivalent plausibility, and one such construction producеs absurd results while the other does not, the court generally
A court cannot, however, forgo an analysis of the statute’s text and instead skip straight to the absurdity doctrine to determine the meaning of statutory text. Indeed, “the fact that an application of clear statutory text produces results that a litigant or others[, or a court, for that matter,] may think are unfair or unreasonable does not render the statute nonsensical or absurd.” McKinney, 318 Ga. at 571 (cleaned up). Simply put, under our system of separation of powers, courts “do not have the authority to rewrite statutes, so when the text is plain, we must follow it.” Id. (cleaned up).
Here, because a textual analysis of the Act yields only one plausible construction—and that construction plainly does not excludе from the Act’s reach individuals who have engaged in racketeering activity within the context of a “domestic dispute”—the Court of Appeals should not have invoked the absurdity doctrine. See McKinney, 318 Ga. at 571 (rejecting the appellant’s argument that the statute at issue should be construed to avoid absurd results where the “plain text” of the statute could not be read to support such a construction); Domingue v. Ford Motor Co., 314 Ga. 59, 67 n.7 (2022) (rejecting the appellant’s argument “that we should deviate from a straightforward reading of the statutory
In sum, the Court of Appeals erred by affirming the dismissal of Warner’s complaint on the basis that “extending the Georgia RICO Act” to a “domestic dispute would lead to unreasonable or absurd consequences not contemplated by the legislature[,] in defiance of common sense and sound reasoning.” Warner, 375 Ga. App. at 814.10 We therefore vacate the Court of Appeals’s opinion and remand this case to that court for it to consider whether, in light of the pаrties’ remaining arguments, the complaint states a claim under
Judgment vacated and case remanded. All the Justices concur.
Notes
A person who knowingly and willfully falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; makes a false, fictitious, or frаudulent statement or representation; or makes or uses any false writing or document, knowing the same to contain any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry, in any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of state government or of the government of any county, city, or other political subdivision of this state shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by a fine of not more than $1,000.00 or by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years, or both.