Extortion is the obtaining of property from another, with that person’s consent, induced by a wrongful use of force or fear. The fear must be one the statute names — among them, a threat of unlawful injury to the person or property of the one threatened (§ 519). The crime is a felony, punishable by two, three, or four years (§ 520); a written threat carries its own provision (§ 523); and where the property is not in the end obtained, the conduct is attempted extortion (§ 524). Applied as elements, a reviewer would test:

1. A wrongful threat inducing fear — here, the threat to carry out an eviction to take the home;
2. Specific intent — that the threat was made to compel the handing over of money or property;
3. Communication — that the demand was conveyed to the tenants; and
4. The handover — that, in fear, they paid (completed extortion); or, if they had refused, attempt under § 524.

The line must be drawn honestly, because it is where this kind of claim usually fails. A landlord’s threat to pursue a lawful eviction for rent that is genuinely owed is not extortion; demanding rent and warning of eviction is a lawful demand. The statute does not reach the lawful assertion of a real right.

What moves this event across the line is that there was no debt to assert. The June rent had already been tendered — the cashier’s check in hand at the broker — so the eviction held over the tenants’ heads had no lawful basis, and a threat to inflict an eviction that the law would not permit is a threat of unlawful injury to their possessory interest in the home. The money demanded was not owed in that form: a second payment, in cash, into a personal account. Under Beggs, fear used to extract even a real debt is extortion; here there was no debt at all. Under Flatley, a demand that outruns the legitimate claim is extortion as a matter of law; a demand for a payment already made outruns every legitimate claim.

The good-faith exit is foreclosed not by recollection but by the record. Three documented facts stand in its way.

1. The tender was received. The $4,338.48 cashier’s check (#0084411044) was delivered by United States certified mail (tracking #9534914882764149935944) and signed for — and the owner’s own text, “Hanson has the check,” places the payment in his knowledge while the cure window was still open.
2. The funds were retained. The payment was kept — never credited, never returned. One cannot hold a tenant’s payment and simultaneously hold, in good faith, that no payment was made.
3. The knowledge was present at court. On the day of the proceeding, the funds were still retained in the account, and that retention was known. A representation of nonpayment made with the payment in hand cannot rest on good-faith ignorance — ignorance is the one thing the retention rules out.

The point is made sharper by the sophistication of the parties: the rules that the acceptance and retention of a late payment carry their own consequences, and that a notice may demand only rent lawfully owed, are rules these parties themselves publish and hold out as their expertise. Knowledge of the rule is not in question. With good faith foreclosed, § 518’s wrongfulness and intent are established by the documents, and the demand becomes what the statute names.

Three things, stated plainly so the page holds:

1. Proof of the demand. Extortion turns on the demand having been made. If it survives in a text, an e-mail, or a recording, that is the lead exhibit and the felony is on the strongest footing. If it rests on the tenants’ account, it is corroborated by the surrounding record — the retained funds, the second payment’s existence, the contemporaneous texts — but the words themselves remain their account, and the page says so.
2. “No debt” is the contested core. The wrongfulness of the threat depends on the tender having been legally effective, so that nothing was owed. That is the documentary fight that runs through this whole record; the extortion charge sits upon it.
3. Reach, not result. Extortion is a felony, but the charging decision belongs to the District Attorney; a private complainant refers. This page presents a question for that review.