Can you go to jail for giving someone herpes?
In some states, yes - knowing transmission has been prosecuted under STD-specific statutes and general assault law. The trend runs the other way: modernization, civil suits instead of charges, and intent as the dividing line.
The criminal map.
A band of states retains STD-exposure crimes: knowingly engaging in intimate contact while infected, without disclosure - with most statutes born in the HIV era and some drafted broadly enough to cover herpes and other infections. Prosecutions for herpes transmission specifically are rare but real, typically charged where the proof of knowledge is documentary (a diagnosis in the medical file, messages admitting it, a partner’s recorded question answered falsely). Several states have modernized - California’s 2018 reform (SB 239) reduced intentional-transmission crimes to misdemeanors and centered actual intent; other statutes have fallen to constitutional challenges. General assault and reckless-endangerment theories fill gaps where no specific statute exists - harder to prove, occasionally attempted.
The lane where these cases actually live.
The realistic exposure is civil: negligence (a duty to disclose known infection before intimate contact), battery (consent obtained by omission is vitiated - the act exceeds what was consented to), and fraudulent concealment theories. Plaintiffs’ verdicts and settlements in herpes-transmission suits have reached six and seven figures, with the famous ones making national news. The elements are knowledge, non-disclosure, transmission, and causation - and causation is genuinely contested terrain: herpes’ prevalence, asymptomatic shedding, testing limitations, and strain typing all complicate proving who infected whom, in both directions.
If you are accused.
Whether the letter came from a prosecutor or a plaintiff’s firm, the same discipline applies: no apologetic texts, no narrative statements, no “clearing it up” conversations - admissions of knowledge are the entire case, and they get manufactured in emotional exchanges. Preserve the records that show what you knew and when (or did not), including your own testing history. The defenses are real: lack of knowledge at the relevant time, disclosure that did occur (witnesses, messages), causation (strain typing and timeline), and consent frameworks. An accusation this intimate is still an accusation with elements - it gets defended on them.
The prevention paragraph, because it is also legal advice.
Disclosure before intimacy is not just ethics - it is the complete defense to every theory on this page. Document it where the relationship allows. And if you learn of a diagnosis mid-relationship, the conversation you dread is cheaper than the litigation you are reading about. This page exists because people search it scared; the honest summary is: jail is unlikely, lawsuits are possible, and knowledge plus silence is the only fact pattern that loses everywhere.
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