A court order prohibiting a Hunterdon County woman from writing about her family on Facebook and elsewhere was deemed constitutional last week by an appeals court.

The woman, identified in court papers only as H.L.M., was ordered as a condition of her probation to stop posting about her children and ex-husband. Her online writings, which mentioned the Book of Revelations, Jeffrey Dahmer, Satan and Adolph Hitler, were called “rambling, irrational, disturbing, bizarre” by a judge.

But the woman argued that the ban was overly vague and restrictive of her First Amendment liberties.

In the appellate ruling, issued on May 13 by judges John Kennedy and Michael Guadagno, the court disagreed, saying the decision did not restrict H.L.M. from writing about anything other than her family, and was directed at protecting her children, whom she abducted three years ago.

H.L.M. ran away with her two young children one morning in 2011 after she had lost custody of them, prompting authorities to issue missing persons alerts. She was later caught trying to take them over the border into Canada.

She accepted a plea deal, and the state agreed to drop the kidnapping charges as long as she agreed to get a psychiatric evaluation and undergo therapy.

In December 2011, a judge learned that she didn't receive therapy and had posted “clearly disturbing” online writings. A psychiatric evaluation determined H.L.M. suffered from bipolar disorder, but was not a danger to herself or others.

An attorney for the state asked that she be banned from blogging about her ex-husband and children, out of concern that her children would someday read it. The judge agreed and enforced the ban, ordered her to have no contact with her children, and gave her five years probation.

“Any blogging shall not reference the husband or the children. You can talk about what you want to talk about, but don't reference the husband or the children. That's off limits," the judge said.

But she continued to write about her family, referring to them now as “Camelot” — a replacement she readily admitted to her probation officer, according to testimony from a hearing in August 2012. She referenced “Camelot” 161 times on her blog between the gag order and that hearing.

She was charged again in November for continuing to blog about her family, and a week later she entered her appeal.

MORE HUNTERDON COUNTY NEWS