San Francisco's chief lawyer sent demand letters ordering a journalist and Substack to erase a lawfully published story about a tech CEO's arrest. The story is still up. Taxpayers are out $45,000.

The San Francisco City Attorney's office — David Chiu's office — invoked a state records-sealing law to try to force independent journalist Jack Poulson and Substack to remove reporting about Premise Data CEO Maury Blackman's 2021 domestic-violence arrest. First Amendment advocates sued the city and the state in federal court, arguing that a government agency threatening a publisher over lawfully obtained reporting is the kind of prior restraint the Constitution flatly forbids. The city settled. What's left is a $45,000 taxpayer bill, an article that never came down, and a warning to every prosecutor in California who might be tempted to try the same move.

When a lawyer for former Premise Data CEO Maury Blackman couldn't get an embarrassing story scrubbed from the internet, he found a more powerful ally: the government.

According to reporting by the SF Standard and the federal lawsuit at the center of the case, the sequence began in September 2023, when independent journalist Jack Poulson — a former Google engineer who covers the intersection of technology and the military on his Substack, "All-Source Intelligence" — published a piece headlined "The Covert Gig-Work Surveillance CEO Arrested for Felony Domestic Violence." Poulson had obtained a police report about Blackman's Dec. 21, 2021 arrest from a confidential source. What he didn't know, per the Standard's account, was that a court had sealed the report in February 2022 after the alleged victim recanted. Prosecutors never charged Blackman.

Blackman's camp threw everything at the piece first. The suit against the city alleges someone claiming to represent him offered Poulson money to take it down, then pressed Substack that it violated platform policy; another representative filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice claiming Blackman owned the copyright to the police report itself. Substack's Trust & Safety team unpublished the story twice, Poulson says; both times he appealed and it was restored.

Nothing stuck. So nearly a year after the story ran, Blackman's lawyer turned to the office of San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, according to the Standard and the lawsuit. Deputy City Attorney Jennifer Choi sent letters to Poulson's attorney and to Substack citing Penal Code Section 851.92(c), which penalizes disseminating sealed police reports, and demanding removal. "We expect you will immediately remove the Incident Report and its contents from your website," one letter read, according to the Standard, and "refrain from publishing this material in the future."

That instruction — a government office ordering a publisher to unpublish and to stay silent going forward — is what turned a private grudge into a constitutional case. First Amendment advocates, including UCLA constitutional-law professor Eugene Volokh, sued San Francisco and the state in federal court. The city settled; the article remains online.

"Here it did look like the city attorney's office stepped in on the side of the person who wanted things erased," Volokh, a plaintiff in the case, told the Standard. "This is a pretty powerful signal to law enforcement. ... This is not a sound step. If they try to enforce it, a similar lawsuit will probably happen to them."

There's a detail worth holding up to the light: in 2022, Blackman, listed as Premise's CEO, contributed $500 to Chiu's campaign, according to campaign disclosures reported by the Standard. It is a small sum and proves nothing on its own — but it sits uncomfortably beside a public office deploying its enforcement power on a donor's behalf.

The legal wreckage is still spreading. Blackman's own suit against Poulson was dismissed under California's anti-SLAPP statute, with a judge ordering him to pay $400,000 in fees and costs; he is appealing. Two more Blackman suits remain pending, according to the Standard — one against the city over release of the sealed record, one against Poulson and Substack over the publication.

The core statute was written to help ordinary people clear their names after arrests that went nowhere. Here, a government office aimed it at a reporter instead — and the city's $45,000 settlement is the price of finding out it couldn't.