Mothers are some of the strongest people I know. The work of raising the next generation, managing a home, investing in relationships, showing up for everyone around you, is its own full-time endeavor. And then there is Kayleigh Kozak, who has done all of that while quietly becoming one of the most consequential victim advocates in the country.
In middle school, Kayleigh was sexually abused by her soccer coach. It is not the thing that defines her, but it is where her story in advocacy begins, and points to why the work she does now matters so much to so many people who have never met her.
Despite the crime committed against her, she built a life. A family. A home. She earned her degree from Liberty University with a focus on Family Christian Counseling, and spent years raising her children before the past came back in a single phone call. A probation officer was calling to inform her that her abuser was petitioning to have his probation lifted.
“It was like a bomb was dropped in my life,” she has said. “I can tell you exactly where I was standing when I got that phone call.”
What followed was a crash course in just how little the system had considered the long-term needs of survivors. When she sought a protective order, she was told she needed to prove a recent encounter with her abuser to justify one. The burden of demonstrating ongoing danger had been placed entirely on the person who had already been harmed. There was no good path forward, so she decided to create one.
That is not a small thing to do. It is an enormous thing to take such a painful chapter of your life and walk it into a legislature. To sit across from lawmakers and explain, calmly and clearly, why a gap that should not exist does exist, and what it costs real people when it does.
What could have been a one-time effort to resolve her own case has grown into years of sustained advocacy. Through that work, she has championed policies that placed approximately 7,000 sex offenders onto the public registry, co-chaired a ballot measure campaign that secured natural life sentences for individuals convicted of sex trafficking minors, and pushed through legislation requiring sex offenders with parental rights to notify their children’s schools of their status. Thousands of lives changed because of protections and commonsense legislation that simply had not existed before.
And then there is Kayleigh’s Law. Born in Arizona, it gives survivors of serious and sexual crimes the ability to petition courts for a lifetime no-contact injunction against their abuser, one that can be issued at sentencing and cannot be appealed or removed at the offender’s request. It is the protection she wished had existed for her. Arizona passed it. Then Wisconsin followed.
She could have stopped there. Instead, the Kayleigh’s Law Act of 2026 would take this protection to the federal level, requiring federal courts to issue lifetime no-contact injunctions against anyone convicted of federal sex crimes or violent felonies when requested by the government or the victim. It is the next step, and she is pushing for it with the same relentless clarity she has brought to every step before it.
Kayleigh Kozak did not set out to become a legislative force. She set out to make sure no one else got the same phone call she did, and found themselves with nowhere to turn. Every bill passed, every offender added to a registry, every state that has adopted her law traces back to that moment, and to a woman who refused to let the gap she fell into become someone else’s story.