San Francisco's city attorney's office demanded that a journalist and Substack delete a published story about a tech executive's 2021 domestic violence arrest, invoking a state law meant to protect sealed arrest records — and the effort has now cost the city and state a combined $75,000 in a federal settlement. Deputy City Attorney Jennifer Choi sent letters demanding the immediate removal of the incident report and its contents, targeting reporter Jack Poulson and the article he published detailing Maury Blackman's arrest on suspicion of domestic violence against his girlfriend.
The story at the center of the fight traces back to December 21, 2021, when Blackman, then chief executive of San Francisco-based intelligence contractor Premise Data, was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence in San Francisco. As reported by The San Francisco Standard, prosecutors ultimately did not charge Blackman, and a court sealed the police records in February 2022 after his girlfriend retracted her claims. Poulson, a former Google engineer who has covered technology and military issues on his Substack since 2023, obtained a copy of the police report from a confidential source and published the story in September 2023.
A Cascade of Takedown Attempts
Blackman's response escalated well beyond a polite request. His representative first sent Substack a DMCA notice claiming copyright in the police incident report itself, and his lawyer separately offered Poulson money to take the story down, according to the lawsuit. When those efforts failed, Blackman's lawyer cited California Penal Code Section 851.92(c) — a statute that prohibits dissemination of sealed police reports — in formal takedown letters.
Choi's office then got directly involved. The deputy city attorney demanded and sent letters requiring Poulson and Substack take down the story, cited state law in doing so, and even asked Blackman's attorney to send copies of the letters already sent to Substack and Poulson. Choi's office went further still, asking Substack to refrain from publishing the material in the future. Blackman's own lawyer later thanked Choi's office for helping enforce laws protecting Blackman, according to the report. Substack's trust and safety team unpublished the story twice; Poulson appealed both decisions, and Substack restored the article each time.
Legal Experts Call It Unconstitutional
First Amendment lawyers described the city's letters as unconstitutional prior restraint, per the account. UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh said the city attorney's office appeared to side with the person seeking to erase the story. First Amendment Coalition legal director David Loy called the letter a transparent violation of the First Amendment. Media law attorney Thomas Peele said the First Amendment prohibits government from stopping journalists from publishing news stories, and suggested the city attorney should study the Pentagon Papers case.
Blackman did not stop with pressure campaigns against the journalist. He sued Poulson and Substack, along with Tech Inquiry and Amazon Web Services, seeking $25 million in damages over publication of the story, and separately sued San Francisco over release of the sealed record. According to the Wikipedia entry documenting the case, San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Christine Van Aken dismissed Blackman's defamation suit in February 2025 after granting an anti-SLAPP motion, ruling that reporting on the conduct of prominent business leaders is protected under the First Amendment as a matter of public interest. Blackman is appealing that dismissal, and he still has two lawsuits pending.
The Financial Fallout
The anti-SLAPP dismissal came with teeth. Judge Van Aken later ordered Blackman to pay $400,000 in attorneys' fees and court costs to Poulson and his co-defendants, a sanction the Electronic Frontier Foundation highlighted as a deterrent against retaliatory litigation. Meanwhile, First Amendment advocates sued San Francisco and California in federal court, alleging that enforcement of Penal Code Section 851.92(c) against journalists violated press freedom protections. That federal case settled out of court this past June, with San Francisco agreeing to pay $45,000 and California state officials agreeing to pay $30,000 to the plaintiffs, according to the First Amendment Coalition. As part of the settlement, officials committed to no longer enforcing the law against the plaintiffs in the case. The San Francisco City Attorney's Office, led by David Chiu, described the proposed settlement as an appropriate resolution given the costs of continued litigation.
Not Choi's Office's First First Amendment Fight
This wasn't an isolated episode for Chiu's office. Court records show David Chiu's office attempted to subpoena U.S. News & World Report in 2021, demanding the publisher's hospital-ranking methodology. U.S. News reported that no documents were ever provided, and the publisher's lawsuit against Chiu's office was ultimately dismissed after the two sides reached a settlement in September 2025, per the City Attorney of San Francisco's own record of the settlement.
The Blackman saga also stretches into more unusual territory. In court filings, Premise Data requested communications concerning Poulson and Blackman's alleged domestic issues, and separately made a similar request in Santa Clara County court filings. Blackman himself emailed the city attorney's office complaining that the document remained unlawfully hosted online. And in July 2025, the Freedom of the Press Foundation reported that reputation management actors working on Blackman's behalf had manipulated Google Search's Refresh Outdated Content tool to temporarily deindex news articles about the arrest, before Google patched the vulnerability.
Why It Mattered Beyond the Newsroom
Blackman's national security ties raised the stakes of the story he was trying to erase. He held a security clearance for Premise's Pentagon work, and clearance requirements obligated him to report any arrest as a potential national security concern. Premise Data, the firm he led before resigning as CEO in December 2023 — about three months after Poulson's initial Substack post — paid users around the world to collect data such as grocery prices and ATM counts, and sold that collected data to clients including the U.S. military.
Despite years of legal pressure, DMCA notices, cash offers, and takedown letters citing state law, the article remains online. Open questions remain about whether the California Legislature will move to repeal or amend Penal Code Section 851.92(c) to explicitly protect newsgathering, and how Chiu's office intends to handle future requests involving sealed records.
