Former tech CEO suing to get the record of his arrest removed from the internet

https://sf.gazetteer.co/a-former-tech-ceo-is-on-a-crusade-to-get-the-record-of-his-arrest-removed-from-the-internet

by danso • 1 year ago

227 152 1 year ago

sf.gazetteer.co

gigatexal• 1 year ago

Interesting. Will be consequential depending on the outcome: could have huge ramifications for free speech and journalists everywhere

ok_dad5• 1 year ago

Seems like a Streisand effect case to me, but I'm not Maury Blackman so I can't say whether or not his arrest for domestic violence in Mission Bay in 2021 will be more well-known now that he's bullying and suing a reporter about it and trying to make it disappear. I can't believe that he might be successful, too, the USA is at some sort of crossroads where if we're not careful the most important freedoms that we have, those we can use to fight un-democratic trash, will vanish.

shadowgovt• 1 year ago

Definitely, but in this case, it may be a Streisand Effect with a $25 million payout attached.

it is unclear to me whether US law and precedent has the idea of "half-truths" being defamatory. In this case, I'd imagine that would apply if it can be applied; the plaintiff was technically arrested, but legally the arrest itself was expunged. So telling people he was arrested is a truth that definitely isn't telling the whole truth.

wbl• 1 year ago

The US has truth has absolute bar to defamation. He really did get arrested the police report says what it was reported to have in it.

buyucu2• 1 year ago

I doubt the journalist actually has 25 million to pay, even if the CEO wins the lawsuit.

darth_avocado2• 1 year ago

Streisand effect is for when someone is trying to intentionally hide something from the public eye. Here the case is already in the public eye and they are suing for damages. It seems less about hiding it anymore and more about seeking damages for what’s already been shared in the public.

duxup4• 1 year ago

Seems like a Streisand effect case to me

He already lost his job, news is out there, so at some point I wonder if the effect doesn't matter anymore.

I gotta think it doesn't really matter if more distant randos (you, me) know.

abrookewood• 1 year ago

Hmmm ... at some point, maybe one of those random people are in a position to hire him and now they know.

cowl• 1 year ago

He was suing to remove the report from google results so FUTURE employers do not find it. so yes, the effect mattered to him. now even if he wins that case there will be dozens others that have reported this and will be impossible to remove them all.

jjeaff• 1 year ago

In this case, the effect would not be to merely bring the arrest to light. Anyone who comes across the arrest now, is likely to come across the whole story, which is that it has been expunged and he was not guilty.

ok_dad5• 1 year ago

The whole story is also what the report says, which was that his partner was bloodied and cut and only recanted her story after he was being arrested, which is common in domestic abuse cases. His arrest was sealed after the charges were dropped, but he wasn't found "not guilty" or "guilty" in this case.

Also, the "effect" could be to ruin an independent reporter, not just hide or explain the arrest.

Hizonner3• 1 year ago

expunged and he was not guilty

Sealed, for undisclosed reasons, with no determination as to his guilt or lack thereof.

sangeeth96• 1 year ago

The internet never forgets as they say. I'm not sure why this person and their lawyers even thought it was a good idea to bring this into court and drag it out long enough for even more news outlets to pick it up and links to be indexed by search engines. This is never getting erased. I'd be shocked if the plaintiff somehow wins, doesn't make any sense to me.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 1 year ago

Poulson described the fight as “an immense time sink.”

I'll bet that he turns out getting a big rep bump from this, though.

If it were Texas or Oklahoma, there's a good chance that he'd be thrown in jail, or get a wood shampoo, at his next traffic stop, but in San Francisco, this will not be buried.

afavour• 1 year ago

Streisand effect is clear here but also worth pointing out that this is a clear downside of citizen journalism, or even small newsrooms: even if they’re in the wrong the rich can sue news providers into oblivion via lawyers fees alone.

ceejayoz2• 1 year ago

Not just small newsrooms; Gawker was plenty big.

Peter Thiel had a bigger bankroll.

WarOnPrivacy• 1 year ago

Not just small newsrooms; Gawker was plenty big.

Yes. It was maddening seeing news orgs everywhere yawn at this process. It was an obvious proving ground event - and today is being more widely deployed.

perihelions2• 1 year ago

The same lawyer who won Gawker threatened the New York Times to not publish their stories about Harvey Weinstein's rapes,

- "Weinstein's attorney Charles Harder, who was then known for filing the suit that bankrupted Gawker, said his client would be suing The New York Times,[140] but by October 15, 2017, Harder was no longer working for Weinstein.[141]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Weinstein_sexual_abuse_...

There were multiple other news companies (not including the Times) that were successfully dissuaded from publishing anything about the Weinstein accusations, by his litigation threats.

stg22• 1 year ago

Gawker flouted the law.

They were publicly sharing an intimate video of Hogan without his consent, he got a court order telling them to stop and they just refused to obey it, stating that they had a first amendment right to do it. Except, Gawker got the constitution wrong - and apparently didn't even ask a lawyer before refusing to obey the order -, which is why the later law against sharing intimate videos without consent is uncontroversial

Hogan was in the top 1% and even he couldn't afford justice when a large media organisation committed a blatant violation of his rights. His need for Thiel's support isn't an example of oppression of those organisations, it's an example of their power.

darth_avocado2• 1 year ago

Whether he did it or not, if a record was sealed and a journalist explicitly goes around publishing the details of a case and the person loses their job, I think it’s grounds for defamation. The sealed records are sealed for a reason.

gjsman-1000• 1 year ago

If they were sealed, it stands to reason as well that the journalist may not have seen all the sealed records, leading to an incomplete picture. Perhaps the girlfriend had a written recantation, or came to a mutual understanding, or a psychological assessment was conducted, or it was discovered she was the instigator; we wouldn’t know, it’s sealed. Good luck defending your name publicly when your defense requires pointing to sealed records the public can’t verify.

MollyGodiva• 1 year ago

Defamation requires the information to be false.

baobabKoodaa• 1 year ago

As a blanket statement that is incorrect. For example, in Finland it doesn't have to be false.

tw04• 1 year ago

They were sealed because the abused woman refused to cooperate with the state - a pretty common occurrence with abuse victims and definitely not “proof” that the initial arrest should be hidden from public view.

Everything in the initial report is pretty horrible.

lolinder13• 1 year ago

This specific case is not a great test bed for this, but it's absolutely a big problem that newspapers will publish the full name of someone who was arrested, even if they're subsequently released without a conviction or even without charges. It's a massive and dangerous weapon in the hands of law enforcement (and others) that they can permanently damage someone's reputation—harming their future job prospects and social connections forever—without ever having to prove anything.

This isn't a problem that's going to be solved by lawsuits, though, partially because Streisand and partially because in most of the cases where someone's hurt by this the newspapers have no legal obligation to refrain from publishing, so there's no grounds to sue. What we need is to reevaluate the law in light of "the internet never forgets".

hsshhshshjk• 1 year ago

See: Luigi Mangioni

wernerb• 1 year ago

Here in the Netherlands even after criminals are convicted we refer to them as Sean B for example. I agree this is good practise.

eastbound• 1 year ago

I disagree. We publish the full name of the victims, disclosing their privacy and the one of their families, but we don’t disclose the full name of the criminals.

For their privacy.

ourmandave• 1 year ago

What if we had Community Notes for newspaper arrest reports?

"Ourmandave was mistakenly identified by Internet Sleuths and is NOT the shooter in the Grassy Knoll."

ano-ther• 1 year ago

The EU has a "right to be forgotten", which is why you sometimes see a notice under the google results. This usually means someone asked them to clear certain search results.

https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/

https://support.google.com/legal/answer/10769224?hl=en

BoxFour5• 1 year ago

It’s a double-edged sword. If the press is prohibited from reporting on arrests, you can end up with people just apprehended without a trace. The US certainly isn't above that, especially for "national security concerns."

I’m not sure what the right balance looks like, but it’s definitely not a straightforward issue to resolve.

lolinder13• 1 year ago

I can't remember the last time I saw news reports about an arrest where the arrestee plausibly benefited from the story being publicized. Maybe Snowden (who I think was charged but not arrested)?

I think you'll find that where the state has an interest in keeping something under wraps it will be kept under wraps. Most arrest reports are of the casual voyeuristic kind, not serious journalism trying to keep the government accountable.

Animats• 1 year ago

Arrests have to be a public record. Otherwise you get secret jails and disappearances. Like Chicago.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homan_Square_facility

woodruffw4• 1 year ago

It's a problem, but the counterbalancing problem is (IMO) an equally big one: the public has a legitimate interest in how the criminal justice system handles cases, particularly when cases are dismissed before entering a public trial period.

Florida has the worst possible version of this, where local governments/PDs appear to revel in publishing mugshots with virtually no pretense. But if I was a taxpaying citizen in SF, I believe I would be right in feeling entitled to read more about why a domestic violence case with a pre-existing written statement was dismissed and then sealed.

lolinder13• 1 year ago

It's all well and good in theory, but no one publishes the follow-ups because they don't get engagement. Unless there's a very good story behind it, the vast majority of dismissals go entirely unreported, so the only record you get is that so and so was arrested. If it turns out that they arrest someone else for the same crime, you might get a follow-up that mentions that the original person was exonerated. But you certainly don't get a report that "such and such wasn't actually as exciting as it first appeared so charges were dropped".

As you say, this case is the exception, but there has to be a decent middle ground that allows exceptions and doesn't allow casual voyeurism.

JumpCrisscross5• 1 year ago

Florida has the worst possible version of this, where local governments/PDs appear to revel in publishing mugshots with virtually no pretense

Criminal charges are public information in Florida [1].

[1] http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...

LeroyRaz• 1 year ago

Personally, I love how Florida telivises it's court proceedings. I think it really strengthens the oversight and trust people can have in the judicial system.

lokar3• 1 year ago

I think the arrest report is somewhat irrelevant. The neighbor could have knocked on the door and observed much of what was in the report. And without question they could report on their own firsthand experience.

tehwebguy• 1 year ago

This reads like “police abuse their power to arrest, so let’s let them arrest people in secret”

user39393824• 1 year ago

It’s also used to stifle 2A rights. Many states require a license application which intentionally asks not whether you’ve ever been convicted of a crime but whether you’ve ever been arrested, which can then be used to deny you.

curt152• 1 year ago

Protecting the 2A doesn't have to come at the expense of the 1A. The real problem is the license criterion that presumes guilt, not the accurate reporting of the arrest.

ranger_danger• 1 year ago

In what ways has it been used to deny a license application? Please give specific examples.

_heimdall10• 1 year ago

It's a massive and dangerous weapon in the hands of law enforcement (and others) that they can permanently damage someone's reputation

I'd love to see people take the real lesson here - an arrest proves nothing of guilt, and it's surprisingly easy for cops to falsely arrest someone (whether they intended to or not).

Our legal system is flawed enough as it is. When there are real concerns that can be raised over some cases that make it all the way to conviction we should be treating arrest records about as seriously a a politician promising the moon in a stump speech.

lolinder13• 1 year ago

This is a really great idea in theory. Do you have a proposal for how to get there without stepping over tens of thousands of broken lives? How do you go about educating an entire population that's accustomed to thinking that arrest=guilt that this isn't true, especially when their news sources continue to report as though the arrest is the only really interesting part of the criminal justice system?

pjc50• 1 year ago

Some situations (immigration?) count arrests against you even if there are no charges.

aimazon• 1 year ago

I'd love to see people take the real lesson here - an arrest proves nothing of guilt

And neither does a guilty verdict in a court of law. An arrest is a data point that we can use to inform our opinion of someone just as a verdict is.

elevatedastalt2• 1 year ago

Sure. Would you agree to making arrest a protected category in the US so that it can't be used for decision making?

Coz employers, potential spouses, or heck even potential friends aren't going to share your loft ideals.

BizarroLand• 1 year ago

I was arrested once for being close to the scene of a near accident. No damage done, I was on foot, cop saw a brown kid standing nearby and arrested me for public intox. (I blew a 0.0 and was not under the influence).

Totally screwed my day, ticket was dropped but that didn't save me from getting hauled to jail, fingerprinted, and thrown in a cell for 6 hours before they wrote me a ticket and kicked me out at 3 in the morning in downtown ~20 miles from home with no cell phone and no one able to help me out.

Waterluvian• 1 year ago

It’s bizarre and freaky to even imagine the newspapers being remotely the problem here.

The problem is the significant mismatch between the stigma of being arrested and the ease and frequency in which police perform arrests.

Arrests do not imply guilt but arresting someone later found to be not guilty should be incredibly embarrassing for the police. But this is at odds with the unhealthy amount of vindictiveness found in many societies. You get people frothing at the mouth about how cops don’t seem to arrest people so easily. Politicians are perpetually harder on crime because that satisfies fearful minds. But the price of running a society in such a broken manner eventually comes due.

lolinder13• 1 year ago

How do you think the stigma of being arrested developed? It didn't come to exist in a vacuum, it exists in a feedback loop with the kinds of voyeuristic news reporting that glories in showing a captioned photo of a person at their lowest: in a mug shot.

sedatk• 1 year ago

I once chatted with a police department Twitter account that used to publish names and pictures of people arrested. They had said it was their duty to inform the public and I had told them they could do that without attaching stigma to people’s faces and names. They didn’t agree to anything, but had stopped doing it after a while.

iepathos• 1 year ago

Right... but we all know this guy beat his girlfriend from the report. She didn't want to press charges, that doesn't mean this guy is innocent and it doesn't mean he shouldn't suffer reputational harm. For the good of any future women who might consider dating him it's actually in the interest of society that people like this have arrest reports published about them. Many abuse victims are too scared to press charges and just suffer silently. In doing so it enables abusers to move on to new victims who have no way of knowing until it's too late.

IG_Semmelweiss• 1 year ago

I've seen the opposite - hardcore criminals who are later shown to have been sexually abused children, yet the local newspaper cannot even show a facial mugshot, let alone a full name because of zany regulations governming free press reporting of criminal apprehensions.

In the US, we have defamatory and libel case law for a reason.

When you grant criminals rights over victims, the world becomes a worse place.

What world do you want to live in ?

lolinder13• 1 year ago

A world where if we absolutely must group people into immutable categories like "criminals" and "not criminals", we at least work harder than we currently do to limit the number of people who immutably become branded as criminals.

duxup4• 1 year ago

My first thought was if you can be sued for revealing sealed court records? Apparently in CA it is explicitly illegal:

The lawsuit leans heavily on a California law that makes it illegal to publish an arrest report after it has been sealed by a court. The law has been attacked by First Amendment advocates, who say it violates free speech protections, strengthened in this instance because the information is an issue of public interest — an argument Blackman contests.

kittikitti• 1 year ago

In a world where people are eviserated for being too woke, I have no empathy for this former tech CEO who was arrested for domestic violence. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you fire and layoff DEI departments and the lowest performers, why are you crying victim when you get arrested for violent assault?

n144q2• 1 year ago

I think the article made it very clear that there is a distinction between an arrest and a conviction.

But I guess it's very easy for you to write such a comment without ever establishing that the person is actually guilty, as if, in domestic violence, people should be considered guilty unless proven innocent? Thankfully you are not a prosecutor.

lokar3• 1 year ago

I don’t think the arrest is really the important part. It’s the account by the officer of what they saw.

If there had just been a report with that info, and no arrest the damage to him would have been about the same.

curt152• 1 year ago

"woke"

I'd like to see more people spell out what they mean by that overused term.

woadwarrior01• 1 year ago

I think this case is orthogonal to woke and DEI. Would you knowingly hire anyone who's physically assaulted anyone for any position, let alone for that of a CEO?

I certainly wouldn't.

_sys49152• 1 year ago

on the cusp of the incoming dead internet, there could be services provided to intentionally defame everybody of everything and just jam pack the internet with so much disinformation that nobody will be able to trust anything they read.

so this fella caught a case for domestic violence? jam the internet with bunches of fake negative charges across a swath of fake internet pages.

caught doing something stupid and reddit picked it up? jam pack it with a firehose of other plausible fake negative stories.

provide a service, get boatloads of cash, and contribute to the deadification. makes no sense to limp wrist-edly moonwalk into the dead future - barrel through it with tanks. its not like google is working all that great these days anyway

Wistar• 1 year ago

Poisoning. Like cops posting fake speed trap locations on Waze.

n144q2• 1 year ago

Just finished Kara Swisher's Burn Book today, in which she says she does not report on such scoops unless personal matters have a repeated pattern or could affect a company's stock. It never occurred to me that there is such a choice to make here, but after thinking about it a bit, I realized that this is what distinguishes a bad journalist who writes an article that could end up hurting people more and make matters worse (e.g. about people who are going through divorce), from a good journalist that writes about things that actually matter to shareholders and to the industry.

ternaryoperator• 1 year ago

Precisely. This is the difference between scandal-mongering and journalism. Both can cover things that are true and factual, so can be deemed news. However, the former is closer to entertainment than it is to information of value.

swatcoder2• 1 year ago

Yep, professional journalists for much of the 20th century aspired to be conscious of what they were covering and how that served the public interest. There was a duty being honored.

It was exactly this understanding that allowed closeted public figures in politics, entertainment, to navigate a time when it wasn't okay for their personal lives to be made public. Journalists and editors were often aware of stories that could be told, but believed that their duty wouldn't be served by reporting on them.

Journalism did not always look like that, and did not everywhere look like that, but it was the prevailing norm.

We're now in a very different time again, where any "scoop" that stirs moral outrage, earns lurid eyeballs, or undermines a public figure is not only fair game, but the ideal career-making story.

nmstoker• 1 year ago

I'm not up to speed on the California court system, but is there some way to establish if a case is sealed?

Wouldn't such a form of lookup, in itself, defeat the point of trying to make it secret?

perihelions2• 1 year ago

I recall reading in one of Ken White's pieces that his one of his most frequent types of consultation, in his First Amendment litigation practice, is with victims of domestic violence being sued by their abusers.

buyucu2• 1 year ago

It would be such a shame if this went viral.

Before today I did not know who Maury Blackman was. I now know that he was arrested for domestic violence in 2021.

Here is the original news report: https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/the-covert-gig-work-surve...

jarsin• 1 year ago

I remember all those "who got arrested" sites. The ones where you had to pay to remove yourself.

Not sure if there have been lawsuits around those as well.

Bengalilol2• 1 year ago

The Streisand effect in full force. Hiring a competent and transparent person—someone who shows remorse, regret, and apologizes while explaining why such behavior won’t happen again—despite a past conviction for domestic violence isn’t necessarily the real issue. But hiring someone who shifts the blame onto others for making the news public? That’s an entirely different problem

winwang• 1 year ago

despite a past conviction

What conviction?

Bengalilol2• 1 year ago

You are right. That's my opinion, which is of no interest at all and factually there was not any conviction.

Let me rephrase :

The Streisand effect in full force. Hiring a competent and transparent person—someone who shows remorse, regret, and explains how they’ve grown from a difficult situation—isn’t necessarily the real issue. But hiring someone who shifts the blame onto others for making past incidents public? That’s an entirely different problem.

zombiwoof• 1 year ago

He’s clearly paid off someone to not be arrested

giantg26• 1 year ago

"Poulson called the San Francisco Police Department, which authenticated the arrest report, without mentioning that it had been sealed."

Why are police validating sealed reports? Seems like a major flaw.

jappgar• 1 year ago

"Beyond a reasonable doubt" is a good basis for a justice system, but I'm under zero obligation to operate that way.

If you're arrested for assaulting your girlfriend, it's smart to err on the side of caution and not associate with you in any way. I certainly will not hire you.

"What about false accusations etc etc?"

That's exactly why arrest records should be public.

rideontime• 1 year ago

Wealthy domestic abusers HATE to have their records known. Before Gurbaksh Chahal was banned from Twitter, I made sure everybody who saw his tweets saw what he'd done.

grugagag• 1 year ago

No Streisand effect on Maury Blackman?

pylua• 1 year ago

Why do we publish the names of accused before they are convicted?

Former tech CEO suing to get the record of his arrest removed from the internet

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