Is Swearing at a Referee a Crime in Massachusetts?

Massachusetts wrote a statute for the stands. M.G.L. c. 272, sec. 36A covers a person who has arrived at the age of sixteen years and directs profane, obscene or impure language, or a slanderous statement, at a participant or an official in a sporting event. The penalty the Legislature attached is a fine of not more than $50.

Every phrase in the sentence is an element

The section is one sentence, and it is worth reading slowly, because each part narrows it. It applies to someone who has “arrived at the age of sixteen years,” so a younger spectator is outside this provision. It reaches language directed “at a participant or an official,” which is why the player and the referee are both inside it and why shouting at the world in general is a different situation. And it applies “in a sporting event,” not in the parking lot afterward.

The category is the language, not the anger

Profane, obscene or impure language, or a slanderous statement. Those are the words the Legislature chose, and they describe a kind of speech rather than a level of emotion. Nothing in the text asks how loud the person was, how long it went on, or whether anyone else heard it. What the section asks is what was said and who it was aimed at.

A fine, capped at fifty dollars

That is the whole penalty as written, with no jail term attached. Saying so plainly cuts in both directions. A fine capped at fifty dollars is not serious criminal exposure on its own terms, and it is also not a house rule: it sits in the General Laws, in the chapter on crimes against chastity, morality, decency and good order. Anything a rink, a school or a league does about the same behavior runs on its own track and is not part of section 36A.

What this page is not

Whether some other provision could fit a real incident, and how a court would treat a particular set of facts, are questions about that situation rather than about the text. Naming a second charge here would be guesswork. Section 36A is the statute the video cites, and everything above is a description of what its words say.