blackmailer

blackmail | American Dictionary

blackmail
noun[ U ]
us/ˈblækˌmeɪl/
the act of threatening to harm someone or someone's reputation unless the person does as you say, or a payment made to someone who has threatened to harm you or your reputation if you fail to pay the person:
Reckless behavior made him an easy target for blackmail.

blackmail

verb[ T ]us/ˈblækˌmeɪl/
The guy who blackmailed my father went to jail.

blackmail | Business English

blackmail
noun[ U ]
uk /ˈblækmeɪl/us
a situation in which threats are made to harm a person or organization if they do not do something such as give someone money:
Large corporations can be vulnerable to blackmail demands by computer hackers.
blackmail
verb[ T ]
uk /ˈblækmeɪl/us
to make threats to harm a company or organization if they do not do something you want, such as give you money:
A former executive, seeking damages of $2.5 million, was accused of trying to blackmail the company.

Examples of blackmail

blackmail
That bribery and blackmail resemble market transactions is not sufficient as a test of their legitimacy.
However, persuasion was not always enough, and the priests were forced into blackmail.
Is someone being blackmailed, persecuted or haunted for an all too human previous transgression ?
Fearing a kind of ' domino-effect ', some local officials were determined not to give in to such blackmail.
First, he claimed that he used the missing file to blackmail the secret police and save his life.
State and hospital officials refused to release other bodies from the morgue for burial until the uproar quieted, leveraging the dead as blackmail.
But in the example above this admirable act is preceded by blackmail.
Are we willing to reduce the sentence of an offender if he accepts the operation, or is this a form of blackmail?
In the first place, factionalised parties made party leaders vulnerable to policy blackmail by powerful factions threatening to switch parties.
The so-called "paradox of blackmail" has spawned a substantial literature of its own.
If collateral estoppel did apply, it would seem that the charge of "economic blackmail" would provide the basis for disapproving of the collateral estoppel doctrine.
Neo-patrimonial bargaining at times involves military coercion, political bullying, and financial blackmail.
With time, he also developed a predilection for political blackmail and extortion.
They consolidated their hold over the labourers, maximised their profits and used times of labour shortage to blackmail the planters and to extract exaggerated advances.
At what point is the probability of success so low as to justify the pejorative characterization "blackmail"?
See all examples of blackmail
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.