Is threatening to sue someone considered blackmail?
No - threatening litigation you have a right to bring is the ordinary machinery of civil society. But the demand letter has a felony perimeter: threaten the criminal report, the exposure campaign, or the immigration call unless paid, and the answer flips.
The rule and its logic.
Extortion statutes punish obtaining property through threatened unlawful harm - violence, property damage, reputational destruction, abuse of official power. A lawsuit threat is different in kind: you are entitled to sue, so conditioning settlement on not suing is bargaining over a legal right, not extorting. Every demand letter in America - pay the invoice or we file - lives safely inside that rule. Courts protect it vigorously because civil resolution depends on parties being able to threaten exactly this.
The felony perimeter around the demand letter.
The flip happens when the threatened act is not the lawsuit. “Pay or I report you to the police / IRS / ICE” - threatening criminal or regulatory process to collect a private debt is textbook extortion and coercion in most states (New York’s coercion statutes name it; California’s PC 519 lists threats to accuse of crime; and § 875(d) covers reputation-injury threats federally). “Pay or I go to the press / post the photos / tell your wife” - reputational threats to extract money sit squarely inside blackmail statutes even when every word threatened is true; truth is not a defense to extortion. And lawyers themselves are policed here: bar rules in many states prohibit threatening criminal charges to gain civil advantage, and attorneys have been prosecuted for demand letters that crossed from settlement into shakedown.
Practical advice for both chairs.
Writing a demand: threaten only the lawsuit, tie the amount to the actual claim, and keep the leverage inside the dispute - a letter your lawyer drafts is a letter that cannot be forwarded to a prosecutor. Receiving one that crossed the line: preserve it - a threat to report you unless you pay is evidence against its author, and it transforms your negotiating position entirely. And if you are being told your own messages constitute extortion - the ex demanding property back, the contractor chasing an invoice hotly - the nexus and intent analyses are defenses that counsel builds from the full thread, not the excerpt. Send the whole thread.
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