A San Francisco judge threw out a former technology executive’s $25 million lawsuit against a journalist, who was sued because he published the police record of the ex-CEO’s arrest for domestic violence.
Judge Christine Van Aken on Tuesday agreed with Jack Poulson, the reporter who published the arrest record on his Substack newsletter, that the lawsuit should be tossed based on a law that protects journalists from so-called nuisance suits aimed at restricting legally protected free speech.
“There is a First Amendment protection for truthful reporting of newsworthy information,” Van Aken said in court.
The suit was filed by Maury Blackman, the former chief executive officer at intelligence contractor Premise Data. The company’s business of covert surveillance and security, and its government contracts, might naturally be of interest to the public, the judge added. “It doesn’t really have to be that this is the story of the century for it to be newsworthy,” she said.
Even so, the case has gained a steady stream of media and legal attention since it was filed late last year. Besides raising significant free speech concerns, Blackman’s lawsuit also amounted to an improbable effort to scrub the arrest and its details from his digital history.
Though legal experts gave it little chance of succeeding, Poulson told Gazetteer SF in an interview that the conflict that led to the litigation caused him considerable duress long before the suit was filed. The complaint also named Substack and its web host, Amazon Web Services, as defendants.
“The court correctly recognized that the First Amendment protects Poulson’s right to publish and report on the arrest report,” Victoria Noble, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation representing Poulson, said in an email. “This case was always an attempt to impose liability on a journalist for doing journalism.”
Blackman’s lawyer, David Marek, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment on the ruling by press time.
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.
In his complaint, he argued Poulson violated a California law that makes it illegal to publish an arrest report after it has been sealed by a court. In court Tuesday, Marek argued that his client’s arrest wasn’t newsworthy. His police report was public for more than two months before it was sealed, Marek said, and no one did anything with it, he said.
“I appreciate they’re trying to turn him into, to steal a name, a Mark Zuckerberg, or someone like that, because he’s the CEO of a tech company,” Marek told the judge. “If a Mark Zuckerberg was arrested it’d be in the press. The fact is, Mr. Blackman is not famous,” and his former company, Premise Data, “was of no one’s concern.”
The California law has been attacked by First Amendment advocates, who say it violates free speech protections. That question — whether it matters if Blackman’s report was sealed but legally obtained and exposed — has been challenged by a separate lawsuit free speech advocates filed in San Francisco federal court in November.
“What concerns me is that it mattered at all whether I knew the report was sealed before publication,” Poulson said in an email, responding to Tuesday’s ruling. “I didn’t, but I think journalists should have the right to publish public interest documents which they did not solicit.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 1:10 p.m. on Feb. 5, 2025 to correct the name of the judge who handled the hearing. It was Judge Christine Van Aken, not Judge Rochelle East.
