A California appeals court refused this week to revive a lawsuit brought by a former technology chief executive against a journalist who published a police report detailing the executive’s arrest on suspicion of felony domestic violence.

The reporter, Jack Poulson, the writer and publisher of the All Source Intelligence newsletter, obtained the San Francisco Police Department report from a confidential source, wrote about the arrest and posted a copy of the document online. He learned only later that the arrest record had been sealed, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has supported his defense.

The former executive, Maury Blackman, once the chief executive of the data firm Premise Data, sued Mr. Poulson, the newsletter platform Substack, Amazon Web Services and another organization, seeking damages and the removal of the reporting from the internet. According to a court filing, Mr. Blackman first sued anonymously in October 2024, more than a year after Mr. Poulson published the report in September 2023. The foundation called the suit meritless.

A trial judge threw the case out under California’s anti-SLAPP statute, a law meant to end early the “strategic lawsuits against public participation” that the foundation describes as designed less to win in court than to cost a defendant time, money and peace of mind. Mr. Blackman appealed, arguing that the court order sealing his arrest record overrode Mr. Poulson’s right to report the news.

The Court of Appeal disagreed. “The First Amendment protects the lawfully obtained truthful publication of the information at issue absent ‘a need to further a state interest of the highest order,’” the court wrote — a standard it said Mr. Blackman’s privacy interests did not meet.

The court also held that Mr. Poulson was protected by California’s shield law for journalists, citing a precedent the foundation helped establish in 2006, and that Substack and a second website that briefly hosted a copy of the arrest record were shielded from liability by Section 230 of federal communications law.

“This decision is a win for free speech, for Jack Poulson, and for everybody,” the foundation said.