A Constitutional scholar is calling bull.

Factual Recourting

In Silicon Valley, accurately reporting on a tech exec’s domestic violence arrest seems to be a punishable offense.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, venture capitalist and tech exec Maury Blackman has sued independent journalist Jack Poulson for reporting on his Substack that he’d been arrested on suspicion of beating his much-younger girlfriend in 2021.

San Francisco Police Department officers and Blackman himself admit that the arrest took place — but the issue, it seems, is that Poulson had the audacity to publish it.

After the journalist first published a report on his blog TechInquiry last year, the tech investor lost his job as CEO of Premise Data, a gig app firm that was gathering data for contractors like the US military. While not arguing with the facts of the reporting, Blackman is clearly seeing red as he seeks $25 million in damages resulting from the journalist airing his dirty laundry.

Despite officers witnessing, per the offending TechInquiry report, red marks on the 53-year-old’s 25-year-old girlfriend’s face during the late 2021 arrest, Blackman was never charged with any crime. As such, his record was sealed in 2022 — and in reporting on the apparently leaked arrest file, Poulson is in violation of California law.

Attorneys for the city and Substack itself have demanded Poulson take down his posts about Blackman’s arrest. On one of those posts, the journalist notes that months after its initial publication, a Substack employee identified only by the name “Jim” had “temporarily unpublished” his work before reinstating it with redactions.

Constitutional Question

While the letter of the law seems to state that Poulson was legally in the wrong when revealing that Blackman had been arrested, a First Amendment scholar who spoke to the SF Chronicle suggests that any law punishing journalists is unconstitutional.

“Journalists are entitled to publish documents that they lawfully obtained, specifically government documents,” explained Seth Stern, the Freedom of the Press Foundation nonprofit’s advocacy director who used to sit on the American Bar Association’s media law committee.

The expert pointed to the notorious “Pentagon Papers” case, in which former government official Daniel Ellsberg revealed to the Washington Post and the New York Times the illegal nature of the Vietnam War, as just one of several past rulings where the Supreme Court has routinely refused to enforce laws barring journalists from publishing legally-obtained documents.

“Unless the city wants to take the position that a sealed arrest report is more sensitive than national security or [identifying] victims of terrible crimes,” Stern said, “I don’t think they are in good standing.”

More on the First Amendment: SpaceX Sues California for Violating Elon Musk’s Right to Free Speech