Yeah, just a note though, we did refuse. We fought him on the SERPs instead and he eventually gave up after it became clear we're weren't going to pay. It was certainly more expensive and took longer, but was probably worth it.

You don't really want to become known as an easy extortion target.

What happened to the .com? Does he still own it?

It wasn't a dot-com, and he let it expire after a year. He (also) goes for $company-criticism.ccTLD etc. whatever he can get his hands on that he thinks he can rank for your company name. That's why I said similar case. The legally-not-slander stopped because we made him work to keep it on the first page on SERPs.

I just checked his blog/authority site and he does exactly the same thing to others now. Apparently he won a court case where he did this to a government agency and his current target seems to be a cleaning company that took his parking spot once.

I think you could still use that as evidence if you wanted to take it to ICANN's UDRP.