UPDATE: The case has been tossed.
It’s been almost three years since a San Francisco judge sealed the record of tech executive Maury Blackman’s 2021 arrest for domestic violence. But the allegations still show up in his Google search results, thanks to an independent journalist — one who Blackman is now suing for $25 million.
On Dec. 22, 2021, Blackman, a self-described venture capitalist and former chief executive officer at intelligence contractor Premise Data, was arrested by San Francisco police after an altercation with his girlfriend in their apartment in the Mission Bay neighborhood.
First disclosed by journalist Jack Poulson, the incident report is written by one of two police officers who responded to a 911 call from a woman who reported hearing a “heated argument,” and possibly the sounds of “furniture thrown into the walls” at an apartment building just blocks from Oracle Park.
At the building, an officer listened to a recording the caller said she made with her phone placed against the apartment door, in which the officer heard a female voice saying “stop, please stop,” according to the report.
Blackman answered the apartment door, shirtless and sweaty. Inside, an officer spoke with a woman who the report describes as Blackman’s girlfriend. She had cuts to her left cheek, and possibly a swollen left eye; she was at times crying uncontrollably, but also told police, “he just started beating me.” Police removed bloody pillowcases from the apartment’s bedroom as evidence, according to the report.
“It should be noted that throughout the course of my investigation,” the reporting officer wrote, that the woman became “very uncooperative,” recanted her initial statement, and said that “she did not want Blackman to go to jail.”
In February 2022, less than two months after he was booked at San Francisco county jail, Judge Carolyn Gold agreed to seal the arrest report, and to check a box saying the arrest was “deemed not to have occurred.”
Because the records of the case are sealed, it remains unclear what crime Blackman was charged with. In a 2024 declaration to the court, he wrote that he had been arrested for, but not charged with, felony domestic violence, and that the charges he did face were ultimately dismissed.
An unsolicited message
For almost two years, Blackman’s arrest remained a secret. And it likely would’ve remained that way, had the report not reached Poulson.
The publisher of the All-Source Intelligence newsletter on Substack, Poulson had covered a lawsuit that Premise Data filed against alleged whistleblower employees while Blackman was CEO. He received a copy of Blackman’s police report in an unsolicited message on Signal, an encrypted platform popular with journalists, in September 2023, his lawyers said in a court filing.
Poulson called the San Francisco Police Department, which authenticated the arrest report, without mentioning that it had been sealed. Satisfied it was real, and that it was in the public interest to publicize the allegations, Poulson posted a copy of the report to his Substack on Sept. 14, 2023. The aim of his story, Poulson told Gazetteer SF, was “transparency” concerning Premise Data’s CEO. In December that year, Blackman resigned from Premise.
Then, in October 2024 — over a year after Poulson published details from the arrest report — Blackman sued him for $25 million, arguing the journalist’s story cost him his job as CEO, and that Poulson is liable for more than a dozen claims, including defamation. The complaint also names Substack and its web host, Amazon Web Services, as defendants.
A reputation ‘forever altered’
The lawsuit leans heavily on a California law that makes it illegal to publish an arrest report after it has been sealed by a court. The law has been attacked by First Amendment advocates, who say it violates free speech protections, strengthened in this instance because the information is an issue of public interest — an argument Blackman contests.
In his court declaration, Blackman diminishes his own profile to argue he’s not a public figure. The police report’s illegal publication is a “gratuitous and prurient intrusion into my private life,” he says, causing irreparable, financial harm and “stigmatization.”
Poulson’s stories created the “intentionally misleading understanding” that Blackman was guilty of the events described in the sealed police report, which the former CEO says has “forever altered” his reputation among friends, family, and business associates, according to the filings.
“While my arrest was not itself newsworthy, people and entities interested in hiring me will become aware of it by conducting a basic Google search of my name,” he said in the filings.
Yet, the harder Blackman fights, the brighter the light seems to shine on his arrest, attracting a widening circle of media and lawyerly attention. His lawsuit prompted the First Amendment Coalition to sue both the city of San Francisco and California’s attorney general in federal court, to stop enforcement of the law that blocks journalists from publishing sealed arrest reports.
‘How much you want for removing?’
In October 2023, a month after Poulson published the police report, the journalist received an email from someone with a Gmail address for Christian Ericssen.
“My name is Christian Ericsen,” the message reads, the sender apparently misspelling his own last name. “I’m bothering you to request the cancellation of the post.” The message concludes with links to Poulson’s story about Blackman on Substack, and the police report, which Poulson had posted to the website for Tech Inquiry, a nonprofit he runs that helps reporters cover the surveillance and weapons industries.
The email from Ericssen goes on to insist, in convoluted English, that Poulson should remove the story because “any type of prosecution or conviction was dismissed.” When Poulson asked him about his ties to the case, Ericssen said he was writing on behalf of Blackman, in a “non-formal representation” based on “online cooperation.” The sender declined Poulson’s invitation to call him, explaining that he didn’t live in the U.S.
Christian Ericssen, or Ericsen, appears to be a pseudonym. The email address has been used several times to demand that websites tracking crypto-related scams remove unflattering information about specific people and companies.
Poulson stopped responding to the messages after Ericssen refused to talk on the phone or otherwise verify his identity. But Ericssen continued to send emails over the next six days. His final message asked, “How much you want for removing?”
“Never, under any circumstances, would I entertain a bribe,” Poulson told Gazetteer.
When reached by email, Blackman declined to respond to detailed questions, including about the emails from Ericssen. His lawyer, David Marek, didn’t respond to emails or voicemails seeking comment.
The takedown requests
On Sept. 16, 2024 — a year after publishing the police report — Poulson received a letter from Marek, demanding a takedown of the story.
“By publishing this report on your Substack platform and on the Tech Inquiry website, you have violated multiple legal protections, resulting in significant harm to my client’s reputation and causing emotional distress,” Marek wrote, on behalf of Blackman. “Your actions in disseminating this sealed report and information related to the sealed report are unlawful and require immediate remedy.”
The lawyer gave Poulson 24 hours to remove the report from Substack and Tech Inquiry, or face a $25 million lawsuit.
Poulson said he felt “bullied” by the letter, but refused to comply with its demands. Two weeks later, he received another letter, this time from San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu. Citing the same California law that Blackman’s suit leans on, Chiu demanded Poulson take down the police report, and “refrain from publishing this material in the future.”
That same day, Blackman made good on his threat, filing his complaint against Poulson, Substack, and Amazon in San Francisco Superior Court.
‘Swimming naked’
Initially, for Poulson, the lawsuit set off a scramble for legal representation. He told Gazetteer that he quickly faced tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and struggled to find assistance from free speech groups like the American Civil Liberties Union.
“I guess for the most part you're just swimming naked as an independent journalist is kind of the reality, unless you know there’s sufficiently positive press attention on your case, and it's a sufficiently clear David and Goliath case,” Poulson said. “But I don't really know how much more David and Goliath you can get.”
Eventually, the Electronic Frontier Foundation agreed to defend him, covering all of his legal costs. David Greene, Poulson’s lawyer at the EFF, said the case bears the hallmarks of someone being targeted for exercising their constitutionally protected free speech, and resembles numerous Supreme Court cases that have upheld those protections.
“To me, that’s classically within the very strong First Amendment protections, so I think it’s a very strong case,” Greene said. “It’s very well-established under U.S. law that journalists, or really anybody, who receives information from a source, and that information pertains to a matter of public interest, that they have a very strong First Amendment right to publish that information.”
Substack and Amazon, both named as co-defendants in Blackman’s lawsuit, are aligned with Poulson. In a legal filing, Substack described Blackman’s argument that any statement that his arrest happened is, “by operation of law, not truthful” due to the sealing order, as “Kafkaesque.” He was arrested on suspicion of felony domestic abuse in 2021, “and the sealing order does not render it false,” Substack said.
Substack’s response goes further, arguing Poulson’s stories were “equally related to the public’s interest in journalism about the status of women in the technology sector generally, and efforts to improve accountability for men who engage in abusive behavior toward women.” Amazon, in its court filing, called Blackman’s arguments about his arrest “spurious.”
Blackman is now at a critical juncture in his campaign. Next month, a San Francisco judge will hear Poulson’s argument that the case should be thrown out under a law that protects journalists from so-called nuisance suits, which aim to restrict legally-protected free speech.
Poulson says Blackman has made it “overwhelmingly clear” he is bothered by his Google results, but “he does not contest the facts” in the journalist’s reporting. “Basically he’s trying to clean up his Google search history through this lawsuit,” he told Gazetteer.
City Attorney becomes a defendant
In a classic example of the Streisand Effect, Blackman’s lawsuit has caused media interest in the fight to snowball, with stories in the San Francisco Chronicle, Daily Mail, and Courthouse News Service. It has also generated intense interest among First Amendment advocates, spawning another lawsuit in federal court over the California law forbidding the dissemination of sealed arrest records.
In November, the First Amendment Coalition and a constitutional scholar at UCLA’s School of Law sued the San Francisco City Attorney and California Attorney General, arguing that the state law violates the First Amendment.
“If members of the press or public happen to learn about an arrest such as the one at issue in this case, that’s a matter of public concern that the press and public have a right to report, and the people have a right to read about,” David Loy, a lawyer at the First Amendment Coalition, told Gazetteer.
In what legal experts agree is an unusual move, the Attorney General and San Francisco City Attorney agreed last month to a court order blocking officials from enforcing the law until the litigation is resolved.
“I take it as an encouraging sign that our position is correct, and that they saw the writing on the wall, and chose not to fight over it,” Loy said of the agreement.
Asked if Blackman was behind the city attorney’s letter to Poulson, Jen Kwart, a spokeswoman for City Attorney Chiu, confirmed in an email that the office had learned about Poulson’s Substack post from Blackman. Chiu’s letter was “meant to inform and educate Substack about the court order, and ask that the information be removed from their website,” Kwart said.
Poulson described the fight as “an immense time sink.” He said that, early on, a lawyer he consulted told him to give up, because “usually the rich people just win.”
“Obviously, I have not,” Poulson said. But Blackman’s suit shows that wealth is a powerful tool against free speech, he said, even if the argument is “legally ridiculous.”
