Legal Question in Personal Injury in California

Probably not. Threatening to release embarrassing information unless you are paid, even if what you are demanding is a legitimate claim, is extortion. Of course insurance companies deny or delay paying claims all the time. So they probably would just laugh at you unless you have some special secret information that would be very damaging to the company or its insured that they would be desperate to keep from becoming public. But then if you do have such information and that is what you are threatening to go public with, then it is definitely extortion, which is a crime. So you have a classic Catch-22. If whatever you would make public is secret and damaging enough that they would care, you would be committing a crime, and if it isn't anything more than that they aren't paying your claim or anything else they don't care about, they'll just laugh and say "go ahead."