Coles Whalen misses her music, but not as much as she misses Colorado.
“I miss it so much,” she says. “I’m still heartbroken that I don’t live there and won’t be making my life there.”
Born in Philadelphia, she moved to Denver with her family when she was one. She started chasing a music career when she was seven, took up the guitar when she was eight, and then learned the piano when she was thirteen.
She began writing music in 2005, when she was 21; that year, she released the Coles Whalen — EP, a short collection that showed off her vocal range and the influence of playing jazz piano in Denver clubs as a teenager. Her lyrics swung from pained and lonely to hopeful, with her powerful voice pining for a lucky break or love.
“Providence, be a friend to me,” she sang on “Providence.” “Help a poor girl see. I don’t want to walk alone anymore.”
She soon decided that the only way she would find any real success was to get out there and show off her talent. So she bought a pickup truck and camper, then set out to perform at Borders bookstores around the country, as the chain regularly hosted live events that were easy to book. She sold enough copies of the EP to cover her travels, with some left over to record her first album, Gee Baby. The album, which was also released in 2005, left the piano behind and relied on Whalen’s guitar and the high notes of her voice to deliver songs that were encouraging, uplifting and, at times, even pumped up.
“Look outside, all Manhattan is dancing for you/Keep your eyes on those lights,” she sings to a female figure living alone in “Manhattan.” “On a tiny tree she keeps in her apartment corner/Hangs an ornament I sent from the Colorado border.”
In 2009, Whalen moved to Nashville, where more country and bluegrass vibes slipped into her music. She traveled to Montreal and won the HITLAB showcase that same year, which led to her recording the album Whistle Stop Road Record with pop star Akon as the executive producer. “You might be my ticket into that country market I’ve been hoping for,” he told 25-year-old Whalen on the televised showcase. “She’s the shit.”
By the end of 2009, her gigs were growing and so was her fanbase. She shared news of her burgeoning stardom on Facebook, the dominant social media of the time. “The industry advice was ‘let people in,’” she remembers. “So I did.”
So many friend requests came in that Whalen’s account was set to automatically accept them.
In 2010, Whalen received a Facebook friend request from a middle-aged Colorado man she had never met, Billy Raymond Counterman; no picture was attached. Counterman subsequently sent Whalen a message claiming he was a promoter putting on a disaster relief benefit concert, and said he wanted her to headline. “Your FB friend,” he signed it.
Before she could respond, Counterman sent more Facebook messages insisting that Whalen call him to talk about the concert, promising that it would make her a star and that she could name the event whatever she wanted.
“It gave me a bad feeling,” she says. “He felt pushy and off, but it didn’t seem scary at the time. So I just ignored it.”
Soon Counterman seemed to disappear. Meanwhile, the music industry was taking notice of Whalen.
Known as an openly bisexual artist, she was invited to open for Joan Jett at the 2010 Phoenix Pride Festival’s thirtieth anniversary. The touring was nonstop; she was playing more than 200 concerts and festivals across the country a year, at both small venues and large, opening for popular acts like Pat Benatar and Rufus Wainwright.
She was meeting “tons of people every night,” she remembers, signing autographs and taking photos with fans. “I was really grateful for all of it,” Whalen says.
In 2012, she released her fifth record, I Wrote This for You, and continued touring while working on her sixth, Come Back, Come Back, to release it the following year.
“Then out of nowhere he comes back,” Whalen says
Facebook Faceoff
“Knock knock…”
In 2014, Counterman sent his first message to Whalen in years: “Five years on FB. I miss you, only a couple of physical sightings, you’ve been a picker upper for me more times then I can count…”
Counterman then started messaging her about the places she’d been over the past three years, with whom and what she was wearing on certain days. “That’s when it hit me,” she says. “He never left. He’s been watching me the whole time.”
Counterman began messaging her “relentlessly,” even past midnight, and the messages were never about her music. “I’m going to the store. Do you want anything?” he’d write. “Can you play along? Good morning, sweetheart.” He would say that he “can’t talk right now. Text me,” and then tell her, “Okay then, please stop the phone calls!” even though she never replied to any of his messages.
“It became terrifyingly clear he thought we were a couple,” Whalen recalls.
In 2014, the messages started coming in “clusters,” according to court documents. Whalen describes them as shifting from “angry” and “delusional” to “threatening” and “dangerous.” He told her to “Fuck off permanently,” and said that “You’re not being good for human relations. Die. Don’t need you.”
Whalen blocked Counterman, but he created new accounts. And he started to hint more and more that he was watching her.
“Was that you in the white Jeep?” he asked. “Five years on Facebook. Only a couple physical sightings.”
Since she was still touring constantly, Whalen would post information about where she’d perform and when. When she was standing in front of dark crowds, she’d wonder if he was out there. She was unable to see the faces — but she didn’t know what he looked like, anyway.
Between 2014 and 2016, Counterman sent hundreds of thousands of Facebook messages to Whalen. Finally, at a show in Dallas in March 2016, she broke into a sweat and was unable to breathe. For the first time, she left the stage mid-performance; she went backstage and cried for hours.
She couldn’t take it anymore. After talking to her aunt, an attorney, Whalen contacted Arapahoe County law enforcement that May.
The officer who responded looked at one screen of messages and contacted his supervisor right away, saying that it was a serious case of harassment and suggesting that Whalen take a concealed carry class to protect herself.
That night, Counterman was arrested in Arapahoe County. As officers approached, he asked: “Is this because of Coles Whalen?”
Detectives told her that Counterman believed he had been in a relationship with Whalen for several years, that they had married and divorced a few times, and that she was the mentally unhinged one who clawed him back every time he tried to leave. He’d said he was saving her from suicide.
According to Whalen, authorities told her that Counterman suffered from a psychiatric delusion known as erotomania, defined by the false belief of being in a relationship. His legal defense argued that he had a mental illness but never really meant to hurt anyone. Later, she learned that Counterman had already been prosecuted federally for threatening to rip out a woman’s throat, and was still on supervised release.
Now Counterman was let out of jail with an ankle monitor to await trial; he was charged with three counts of violating Colorado’s anti-threat laws, meant to protect victims from serious emotional distress. Whalen secured a restraining order to keep him away from her shows.
One day, law enforcement authorities called Whalen and warned her not to go home because Counterman’s ankle monitor showed he was there waiting for her, but then called back and said not to worry, the system had confused his address for hers.
Whalen already felt “totally exposed” at shows, she says, and now she didn’t feel safe anywhere. She finally had a picture of Counterman and handed it to security wherever she performed, but she couldn’t erase the lingering fear that he was in the audience.
She cancelled all her remaining shows and public appearances.
Ahead of his trial in 2017, Counterman’s attorney filed a motion arguing for all charges to be dismissed because he’d only been exercising his protected speech. A judge dismissed the motion after deciding that Counterman’s messages presented a “true threat” to Whalen.
At trial, Whalen felt exposed all over again. She had to testify for a day and a half, sitting “a few feet away” from Counterman, she remembers. Her family and friends also testified as to how much his behavior had affected Whalen.
A jury found Counterman guilty of violating three Colorado anti-threat laws, and he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. He tried to appeal his case from prison on several occasions, always unsuccessfully.
On to the Supreme Court
By the time Counterman was released from prison, Whalen had left Colorado and stopped touring. She didn’t share her whereabouts and performed live very rarely, never posting where she was going to be.
She wasn’t receiving messages from Counterman, but she knew he was still out there. In 2021, the Colorado Court of Appeals heard his case and upheld his conviction.
But Counterman wasn’t the only one now pleading his case. The First Amendment argument that his threats were protected speech because he didn’t intend to harm Whalen had attracted the Cato Institute, which claimed that his conviction could have a chilling effect on free speech.
“Like, ‘Hey, you keep talking to me like that, you could be criminally prosecuted,” Jay Schweikert, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, said in support of Counterman. “It’s really a lot more about the chilling effect this would have on speech, and the ability that public figures – especially political figures – would be able to have to use this sort of implicit or explicit threat of criminal prosecution to shut down their critics.”
The United States Supreme Court took up Counterman v. Colorado in 2022 and heard oral arguments on the case in April 2023. Washington, D.C.-based lawyer John Elwood argued on behalf of Counterman, while Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser represented Whalen’s side. Weiser warned that considering Counterman’s obsessive bothering to be free speech would open the way for stalking cases to become domestic violence cases.
But most of the justices who asked questions, including Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, himself a Coloradan, worried how the state was deciding what could be considered a threat to a reasonable person online without knowing the true intent of the messenger, especially in such a “sensitive” time.
“We live in a world in which people are sensitive and maybe increasingly sensitive,” Gorsuch told Weiser during oral arguments. “As a professor, you might have issued a trigger warning from time to time when you had to discuss a bit of history that’s difficult or a case that’s difficult.”
At one point, Chief Justice John Roberts pressed Weiser to explain how the state knew that Counterman’s messages were real threats, pulling up some of Counterman’s messages. “Staying in cyber life is going to kill you,” Roberts read off, then added, “I can’t promise I haven’t said that.”
Several people in the courtroom laughed.
In July 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the State of Colorado had violated Counterman’s constitutional rights. The two dissenting votes came from Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, who said that in certain cases, prosecutors do need to prove the true intentions behind a threat — but that Counterman’s wasn’t one.
“This was a very disappointing experience for me because there seemed to be a little bit of an attitude that stalking isn’t a real crime, it isn’t a real threat,” Weiser says. “The justices were not empathetic to Coles.”
He also believes it was unprofessional for the judges to laugh, which was offensive to both him and Whalen. For Weiser, “it was a challenge for me to hold my composure” during that moment.
“There’s all these threats she was getting from someone she didn’t know,” Weiser says. “The court didn’t appreciate the gravity of those threats and chose to privilege the speech of the stalker, giving the stalker the same First Amendment rights that a newspaper has reporting on public affairs, and didn’t look hard at the reality that her singing career, her expression, was chilled.
The Next Stage
While the case was being heard, Whalen had gone back to a Nashville studio for the first time in six years and recorded “Stronger,” a song inspired by what she would have said to the judges about her ordeal. She was afraid of how her voice would sound, and worried that if she picked up her career, she’d be starting from scratch.
“It’s not just your public career that a stalker can take from you,” Whalen says. “When you spend most of your life in a recording booth but you then haven’t been in one for six years, it’s intimidating.”
Intimidating, and frightening in its own way. “When you’re in the entertainment business, you’re around entertainers all the time, journalists, production people,” Whalen explains. “You’re hearing all the new stuff way before anybody else does. You’ve got inspiration at your fingertips all the time. I took a purposeful break from all that because I was in so much pain from losing my own performance career.”
After “Stronger” came out in 2024, she began getting stronger, writing more music. She also returned to social media, but as an advocate for stalking victims. Facebook wasn’t the platform it had once been, and she instead went to Instagram to share her story one-minute-long reel at a time. Then she went to TikTok, where she talked about the Supreme Court case and the embarrassment of hearing the justices laugh during oral arguments.
In April, the Max documentary series Hollywood Demons featured Whalen’s story along with the cases of three other entertainers who’d been stalked. The episode made it clear that not just big stars like Taylor Swift are stalked. It happens to up-and-coming artists like Whalen, who can’t protect themselves as easily.
Whalen’s Supreme Court case set a precedent for how the law deals with hateful and threatening speech online, at a time when online threats and subsequent violence are as serious a problem as ever. “It is more important than ever that we take threats of violence seriously, that law enforcement is trained how to respond to such situations,” Weiser says. “We all do our part to turn down the temperature and support one another during these challenging times.”
With the Supreme Court overturning Counterman’s conviction, his record was wiped clean. Arapahoe County confirms it no longer has any public record of his request; the rest is sealed by law. According to Whalen, Counterman has been living in Colorado since his release.
This summer, Weiser asked Whalen to do a benefit concert for his campaign for Colorado governor. It would mean returning to her home state and posting her performance location ahead of time, something she hadn’t done in almost a decade She would also be doing it in the state where Counterman is now a free man.
But Whalen was ready.
Her name, the date and the location were all written on the tickets , which were only sent to a select group and required an RSVP to get the address.
At the event last month, Whalen played “Stronger” as well as new songs that she’d written during the past year.
“I really hope it was just the start,” Weiser says. “Coles still loves Colorado, and that came through.”
Her new music leans back into country, but she’s trying new things like songs with a Latin beat. She plans to release the music in 2026, and in the meantime to continue building her profile as a victim advocate. She has a live show listed for January 23 in Florida.
“I’ve given myself the permission to take it one step at a time,” she says. “If it feels good at the step I’m on, then I’ll go to the next step.”
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