Here the court was more focused on the context of the communication and held that vague, veiled threats or innuendo are equally actionable. It is obvious that threatening an administrative claim or making a criminal complaint that might be otherwise justified by the adverse party’s behavior, cannot be tied to a demand for something in return from the adverse party, it could be extortion as a matter of law because one cannot use threat of criminal process to collect a debt. Normally reporting criminal activity would be a valid exercise of civic duty, but in the context of a dispute, the motive for doing so may be the elements of the crime of extortion. The allegations of wrongful acts may have been true and the email did not identify the specific criminal behavior. The communication in Sareen was an email from the client to his employer in which threatened to expose the President to federal authorities for alleged violations of the False Claims Act. But how do you know in advance where that line is?
#EXTORTION VS BLACKMAIL CODE#
Code section 47 or under the anti-SLAPP statute in Code Civ. Once determined to be the crime of extortion, the statements are not protected speech under the litigation privilege in Civ. Sareen, 226 Cal.App.4 th 1405 (2014) recently revisited the question of when aggressive or belligerent pre-litigation negotiations cross the line from “veiled threats” to criminal extortion.
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