WINSLOW — When Kyla Mihalovits answered her door April 29, the last person she expected to see was a police officer.
Mihalovits was being served with a cease harassment notice from Doris Labranche, her elected representative on the Winslow Town Council. Mihalovits had sent Labranche a series of 10 emails over the past three months, voicing questions about town issues or concerns about Labranche’s performance on council.
Labranche did not respond to any of the emails before serving her with the notice.
The move comes less than a year after Councilor Mike Joseph filed a cease harassment notice against former Town Manager Ella Bowman. The notice from Labranche has left Mihalovits scared to attend town meetings or speak to councilors, raising the question of why elected officials are resorting to legal protection rather than responding to criticism from their constituents.
Labranche and Mihalovits both ran for the District 4 council seat in late 2024. Months after the election, Mihalovits said the notice was taken out to silence her opinions on council decisions.
“I believe this is a way to intimidate me away from dissenting about decisions or actions that they take, and also from looking into other things — they want to silence me,” Mihalovits said. “It is using town resources, through our police department, to intimidate me into silence. And that’s not right in a democratic society, it’s not appropriate for elected officials to attempt to silence constituents just because they don’t like what they’re saying, just because they don’t like them.”
Labranche was contacted several times with a request for comment. She did not respond.
10 EMAILS
The 10 emails from Mihalovits to Labranche contained questions about the town budget, grants, paving projects, property bids, as well as comments about councilor transparency, Labranche’s character and her lack of responses to emails.
It is not out of the ordinary for Labranche to leave emails unanswered. At a council meeting March 10, she said she may not always respond to individual emails but would bring up the items for discussion at meetings.
Mihalovits criticized Labranche’s work on the council but did not use threatening language in her emails. Other than a personal message at the end of one email denying rumors spread online about her personal life, she said each message related to specific town concerns.
“The first email I sent had a PS personal message at the end because I did not appreciate the way that she acted and treated my family, but every other one was to do with very specific things that happened during, before or after meetings,” Mihalovits said. “Whether I’m witty or snappy or whatever has nothing to do with my ability to contact my elected representative.”
Under Maine law, a person is guilty of harassment if, without reasonable cause, the person “engages in any course of conduct with the intent to harass, torment or threaten another person, after being notified in writing or otherwise, not to engage in such conduct” by a police officer or a protective order.

Labranche did not ask Mihalovits to stop contacting her before taking out the notice.
The Winslow Police Department does not require proof that the person taking out the harassment notice tried to cease communication, Chief Leonard Macdaid said over email.
“We don’t make a person provide proof that they asked the other person to stop because some people are afraid,” Macdaid wrote. “In my experience, the court system (does) not like to deal with harassment cases because it is very difficult to distinguish which party is at fault. Of course there are exceptions. Officers have discretion to the action that is taken. Every case is different. We try our best to get both parties to stop the behavior before we take action and issue an order that is good for a year.”
On April 28, the day before Labranche filed the notice, Mihalovits emailed her about the council’s upcoming vote on a bid for the old public library on Lithgow Street, a historical Winslow building. Mihalovits had recommended that Labranche vote for the bid to go to Winslow’s food pantry, which she said over email would win her “popularity points.”
“If y’all vote to accept one of the other bids, just be ready to be disliked even more since you used them as a prop while you campaigned,” Mihalovits wrote. “Oh believe me when I say I’ll make sure everyone is reminded of that!”
The next day, Labranche contacted the police at 5:21 p.m. to request a cease harassment notice, according to the Winslow Police Department log. The call description states: “Doris came in looking for a cease harassment notice be issued to Kyla, Doris has received several emails and feels she is being harassed by Kyla, notice filled out and will be issued.”
The notice was served to Mihalovits at 6:18 p.m. Macdaid said some harassment notices are served faster than others in Winslow, depending on the complexity of the case and the caseload of the responding officer.
“We have to prioritize the most serious cases first,” he wrote over email.
Mihalovits said her communication with Labranche was not threatening and did not warrant a cease harassment notice.
“If I had threatened to harm her in any way, that would have been a different story,” Mihalovits said. “But that has not occurred. I have not gone to her door. Other than the fact that I have to drive down Smiley because it’s the way out of the neighborhood, I don’t drive down her street that she lives on. I have not called her on her phone number. I’ve chose to only email her because I figured she might see it, and knowing that these emails are a matter of public record.”
HISTORY OF HARASSMENT NOTICES
Labranche took out the cease harassment notice during a time of tumult on the council. Councilors Dale Macklin and Jeff West resigned from their seats in early May, with Macklin stating he could no longer be effective because of disagreements and power divides among the seven councilors.
Macklin said the cease harassment notice against Mihalovits is especially concerning — and consistent with negative behavior from some councilors.
“For a town councilor to file a harassment notice against a citizen —I don’t know where they’re coming from,” Macklin said. “That’s the people they are, that whoever disagrees with them and they don’t like: They’re out.”
Labranche’s harassment notice is the second to be taken out by a Winslow councilor in less than a year. In August 2024, Mike Joseph went to a district judge to request a protection from abuse order against former Town Manager Ella Bowman, following an argument the pair had after a council meeting July 8, 2024, which Joseph described as harassment in his complaint.
“I tried to move away (from) Ella, but she continued to yell and put her finger in my face,” Joseph wrote in the filing. “I felt harassed and threaten(ed) of bodily harm or injury that Ella could be capable of doing to me, knowing she was a police officer for about 15 years.”
Macklin, who was on council and witnessed the argument, said there was no risk to Joseph.
“Was it argumentative? Yes,” Macklin said. “Was it real confrontational? Probably not. Mike Joseph was just out to get Ella, and what he said at that meeting, I objected to it, that this was not the time or the place for that to occur.”
The judge denied Joseph’s request. He then went to Kennebec County Sheriff’s Office and successfully took out a cease harassment notice against Bowman, who resigned in November 2024, citing Joseph’s actions in her resignation letter.
“For the first time in my 25-year municipal career, and at 64 years old, I was served a harassment warning by the local sheriff’s office due to a councilor filing a frivolous complaint,” Bowman wrote in her resignation letter. “Councilor Joseph went as far as requesting a Police Escort when he entered the Town Office because he stated that he feared for his safety around me. He also attempted to obtain a Protection from Abuse Order on me. I’ve never had a speeding ticket, let alone physically harmed someone.”
Labranche also threatened another resident with a cease and desist letter over social media in response to claims of anti-transgender rhetoric made about her in 2024.
Macklin said both councilors took advantage of legal processes to intimidate others.
“There’s no question in my mind that Mike Joseph and Doris Labranche abused the harassment process,” Macklin said. “Harassment notices are a dime a dozen, and they basically mean nothing outside of an attack on your reputation. A protection from abuse (order) is entirely different, and that was denied by a judge.”
WHAT’S NEXT?
Mihalovits said she has not attended a council meeting since April 29 for fear councilors will try to have her removed.
“It makes me very afraid that they’ll cause a scene, because it seems to me that they’re trying to not only intimidate me away from this, but with her requesting this cease harassment notice, they’re trying to defame me,” Mihalovits said. “So why wouldn’t they contribute to causing a scene at a meeting by having me removed? Because it won’t be: ‘Why was she removed?’ It’ll be: ‘Look, she was removed from the meeting on camera.'”
Matt Leighninger is director of the Center for Democracy Innovation at the National Civic League, a nonpartisan organization focused on advancing civic engagement. He said public criticism of town officials is nothing new, but that methods for expressing disapproval have become more dangerous in recent years.
“There’s a level now of anger, harassment, hate speech, all those sorts of things which really go beyond criticism,” Leighninger said. “They’re really very bad in many cases, threats that go beyond criticism to really awful things that public officials and no one else should have to have to deal with. But again, this unproductive criticism occurs because we have terrible, old formats for allowing constituents and elected people to interact.”
Officials should not be harassed by constituents, but they do have a duty to listen to them, he said. The best way forward is to improve government structures and communication methods — not to take legal action.
“Why not set up better settings in your community, where you could have productive criticism that is reasoned and informed and civil?” Leighninger said. “If we’re all stuck in this world of emails and nasty Facebook posts, we’re never going to get anywhere, and some people are going to be harassed, and some people are going to be upset because they never get heard. And we just need to change the whole dynamic.”
Towns can improve their democratic processes by encouraging small group discussions, citizen assemblies that gather random samples of the community, participatory budgeting and using technology to crowdsource ideas, he said. Charters can also be revised to include rules for more positive communication.
Until Winslow changes those structures, Mihalovits is stuck in limbo. She said she is not ready to back down.
“I will not be deterred from doing what’s right, and I’m exploring options at this time,” Mihalovits said. “This is my family and where we’ve decided to settle after (my husband’s) military service was completed. We should be able to live peacefully and be involved in our town without worrying about retaliation from elected officials.”
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