Venture Capitalist Invokes Trans Dead-Naming to Justify Media Censorship

Maury Blackman's former ACLU lawyer invokes creative justifications for blocking access to public documents.

Maury Blackman, a venture capitalist and former chief executive of surveillance firm Premise Data, has tried multiple strategies for censoring journalist Jack Poulson.

Blackman demanded that Poulson remove his reporting. When Poulson ignored the request, Blackman filed a lawsuit against the journalist for $25 million and continued with lawsuits against Poulson’s nonprofit, Substack, Amazon Web Services, the hosting service for Substack, all to scrub Poulson’s reporting from the internet.

The dispute centers around Poulson’s publication of a sealed police report relating to a domestic abuse incident. Blackman has not disputed the accuracy of the report. Instead, he tried to silence Poulson for writing about a government document that was legally obtained.

But Blackman is failing. The venture capitalist’s attorneys previously contacted San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu to enforce California’s “anti-dissemination statute” against Poulson to force him to take down the report. Last Thursday, Judge Rita Lin rebuked this effort.

In a preliminary injunction, Lin halted enforcement of the law, effectively blocking Blackman’s backdoor effort to use the state to remove journalistic content.

“Discussing and sharing lawfully obtained information about arrests is not a crime — it’s a core First Amendment right,” said FIRE Staff Attorney Zach Silver in a statement.

Far from destroying the messenger or the message, Blackman’s legal intimidation antics have only created more publicity for the report. Because of Blackman’s heavy-handed lawsuit, Poulson’s reporting now has coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Daily Mail, and Courthouse News – a classic example of the so-called ‘Streisand effect.’

What’s more, the demands for censorship are becoming even more absurd. In a recent court filing, Blackman’s attorney, Ami Sanghvi, invoked racial minorities and the vulnerability of transgender individuals to argue against public access to information:

Here, the legislature explicitly considered the right of public access to a record and determined that the rights of individuals arrested without conviction and the penalties in housing and employment opportunities that they suffer overcomes the right of public access to the record, particularly in light of how “these issues disproportionately affect communities of color.” [...]

To the extent that Defendants argue again the cat is out of the bag (because they took it out), this does not alter the assessment of the overriding interest outweighing the public right of access. See In re M.T., 106 Cal. App. 5th 322 (2024) (reversing a trial court’s order denying a motion to seal the entire record of her name change and gender marker correction that was made five years after the name change). The lower court in M.T., was asked to seal – in 2023 – the record of her name and gender correction in its entirety, which was issued in 2018. The information online included M.T.’s private medical and contact information as well as their former name. This led to her being outed on social media in 2023 which resulted in harassment by anonymous transphobic social media users, cyberbullying, and repeated publishing of her private information.

After the sheer force of intimidation – going after Poulson’s publisher, his livelihood, using the power of the state to remove his reporting, even his web hosting solution – Blackman’s attorneys now ‘go woke’ and suggest that public access to his reporting is somehow negated by the experience of “communities of color” and those who have undergone sex changes?

It should be worth noting that Sanghvi, Blackman’s attorney, is a former attorney for the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Like many former public interest attorneys, she appears to have flipped on her previous support for the First Amendment and now earns a living preventing speech. She has no problem weaponizing social justice rhetoric to help muzzle her opponents. And Poulson, a friend and colleague, will prevail over these thuggish attempts to stifle his journalism.