/r/50501 Mirror

The demand need not be explicit.

https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/white-collar-crimes/blackmail/

A defendant may argue that they did not make a threat. Perhaps the alleged target of the threat has a grudge against the defendant and brought a false accusation to get them in trouble. Often, little evidence other than the accusation supports a charge, since the alleged incident may have involved a conversation with no witnesses or documentation. Challenging the credibility of the accuser thus can go a long way toward defeating the charge.

In other cases, the defendant might not have intended to force the alleged victim to do anything. Suppose that Patrick in the second example above told Veronica that he would tell the landlord that she does drugs in a separate encounter from when she refused to give him her car. She might have assumed that this was implicitly meant to coerce her into giving him the car, while Patrick might have meant it as retaliation for a complaint that she made about his playing loud music.