Santa Cruz seafood entrepreneur faces felony stalking, 34 additional charges after years of alleged harassment
Quick Take
Santa Cruz entrepreneur Clarice Owens, once featured on NBC’s “Today” show, is facing charges of felony stalking and 34 misdemeanors after prosecutors allege she harassed and threatened dozens of neighbors, colleagues and business partners. Court records describe a pattern of doxing, violent threats and repeated violations of restraining orders involving at least 90 people and businesses, even after multiple court warnings and arrests. Behind the public image of a growing brand, the business has fallen into serious debt, faced eviction and lawsuits and ultimately unraveled as the criminal case escalated.
In October 2024, Santa Cruz business owner Clarice Owens sat on the couch on NBC’s “Today” show to discuss Pescavore, her line of seasoned tuna jerky. As host Al Roker took a bite of jerky from the blue and white package and told the millions at home watching that it was “very good,” Owens was preparing to expand the brand to several national retailers.
But according to court records, by the time Owens appeared on television, she had used the public platforms of her company, Healthy Oceans Seafood, to harass neighbors, colleagues in the sustainable fishing industry and other business associates for nearly two years. In the course of that, she doxed dozens of people by exposing their personal information like home addresses and phone numbers online to an audience of thousands.
Behind the image of a fast-growing company, Healthy Oceans Seafood stopped paying rent for its Santa Cruz Harbor office and racked up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. The once-ascendant brand looks to be in a state of disrepair, its manufacturing and distribution at least greatly reduced, and its separate Live Oak production facility showing little activity.
Over the past year, Owens’ neighbor, a former investor, a seafood industry colleague and her homeowners association have each obtained restraining orders against her, protecting nearly 90 people, including spouses and close family members and 75 employees at one company. They claim she has engaged in harmful activities ranging from smearing their reputations and their businesses, resulting in lost income, to posting contact information, license plates and photos online, and issuing threats of gun violence.
According to a spreadsheet provided to Lookout by a group of women who say Owens targeted them, the number of victims includes at least 70 individuals and 20 businesses, from California to Canada, using both private messages and emails and her company’s public media accounts.
In July 2024, Clarice Owens (third from left) produced 2,000 units of Pescavore tuna jerky per week at a facility in Live Oak. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
Privately, her behavior has impacted people and businesses throughout Santa Cruz County, but despite the many court cases, almost everyone directly affected has refused to speak publicly about their concerns. The atmosphere of fear is real and far-reaching, yet police told Lookout they can do little about it.
Now, there may be a reckoning.
On Jan. 21, in Santa Cruz County Superior Court, prosecutors will formally charge Clarice Owens with 34 misdemeanors for violating protective orders, and felony stalking, which on its own carries a maximum penalty of up to three years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The court will schedule her trial date at the arraignment.
Owens has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges. “Ms. Owens has never had a chance to defend herself” against the restraining orders, said public defender Bradly DeMoll at her Dec. 5 arraignment. He also told the court that the plaintiffs have antagonized Owens since she and her husband filed a complaint about a neighbor with their condominium’s property management in 2023.
At that hearing, Judge Denine Guy granted Owens her freedom ahead of the trial as long as she obeyed the court orders and worked with a probation officer. “When I see posts showing weapons, I am concerned,” said Guy, who also ordered a search at Owens’ home on Bay Street in Santa Cruz’s Westside neighborhood to look for such weapons, including baseball bats – with which, in an email obtained by Lookout, Owens threatened to kill her neighbor. Guy ordered Owens to stop emailing, texting or using any electronic means to contact anyone listed in the orders.
“Let this be a wake-up call,” said Guy to Owens. “You’re no longer in civil court; you’re in criminal court,” noting that there could be consequences that carry jail time.
Despite Guy’s warning, Owens didn’t comply. She failed to show up for a mandatory intake appointment that afternoon, and the court received credible information from the police and the district attorney’s office that she contacted multiple protected parties by email. On Dec. 19, she was arrested and charged with two misdemeanors for contacting protected individuals and stalking, and remains in custody without bail.
In early January, she sat in the Blaine Street Women’s Facility, the county’s jail for women, awaiting her court date. It’s unclear whether her business remains in operation; liens, an idle facility and her incarceration make it unlikely. As Lookout prepared to publish this story, the court granted a fifth restraining order to Santa Cruz resident Tara Bergen, with a sixth in process.
The cases offer as many questions as answers. It’s unclear what triggered Owens’ behavior over time, and more recently. Owens and her husband, Matthew Owens, did not respond to two emails and a phone call from Lookout, and her legal team declined to answer any questions. Owens herself has, at times, maintained that she is the victim of stalking and abuse. The court dismissed her two requests for restraining orders filed in 2025 against her neighbors after Owens failed to show up to a hearing.
But those who say they are her victims – some of whom say they have never met Owens – agree that Owens instigated the contentious relationships, and that for months, despite reports to police, there was little they could do to stop her.
Clarice Owens took pictures of her neighbors and police with the camera outside her Westside Santa Cruz home and posted them on Pescavore’s public Instagram account along with personal information and derogatory claims. Credit: Via Instagram
A rising company with a secret
From the outside, Owens has had a soaring professional rise. According to her LinkedIn profile, she attended the United States Naval Academy in Maryland for three years, from 1999 to 2002, while competing as an NCAA Division I track and field athlete. In 2006, she graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace, aeronautical and astronautical engineering, and spent six years working in the field for San Diego-based Solar Turbines and Bloom Energy in San Jose.
In the following years, Owens met Matthew Owens, and moved to Santa Cruz. The two later married, and have a 7-year-old son.
Both Owens and her husband have a background in sustainable fishing solutions. From 2008 to 2012, his LinkedIn profile shows, Matthew was the managing director at FishWise in Santa Cruz before joining Tri Marine Group, a leading supplier of tuna and tuna products globally, as environmental director in 2013. An article by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration from spring 2025 identifies him as the director of sustainability at Tri Marine.
In 2014, Owens and her husband founded Healthy Oceans Seafood in Santa Cruz, although the company didn’t release any products for four years. In 2018, inspired by a trip to Micronesia, they launched Pescavore tuna jerky in three flavors: island teriyaki, smoky poke and Caribbean jerk. The snack, made with fish caught within U.S. fisheries, took off. By the summer of 2024, Pescavore products were available in more than 1,300 stores throughout the West Coast and Hawaii, including certain Safeway/Albertsons, Target and REI locations, and Santa Cruz-area stores such as Shoppers Corner.
In the summer of 2024, Owens told Lookout that Pescavore had recently partnered with the Planet Fitness chain of gyms, with 15 to 20 locations carrying the jerky, and was preparing to launch nationally with a large specialty retailer later that year. At that time, Lookout reported that Pescavore processed and packaged thousands of pounds of tuna at a facility in Live Oak, and made about 2,000 units per week.
But that fall, Owens began using her professional LinkedIn and Pescavore’s Instagram account – which had gained nearly 60,000 followers before Meta deactivated it in October 2025 – to denigrate other seafood companies, in addition to using it to promote Pescavore products. In dozens of posts, Owens – who is Black – accused other prominent seafood companies including Fishwife Tinned Fish, Patagonia and Atlantic Sea Farms of conspiring against Pescavore, “spreading misinformation” and racism. In several posts screenshotted by Lookout, Owens refers to several companies as “the seafood klux klan.”
These first public signs of aggressive behavior were targeted at companies and competitors in the sustainable seafood arena. But it wasn’t long before she began posting about personal disputes, publicly airing accusations that range from mean-spirited – calling business women and neighbors fat or ugly – to accusatory, such as saying that a former investor planned to murder her.
Some of the people on the receiving end of her ire pursued legal action. Within a year, Owens’ neighbor, a former investor, homeowners association and a business associate obtained restraining orders against her that prohibited any contact, including digital.
These examples of posts Clarice Owens made to Pescavore’s Instagram account are two of hundreds attacking Emily De Sousa, a member of the seafood industry, De Sousa says in court documents. De Sousa, who said she has never met Owens in person, obtained a restraining order against her in October, claiming more than a year of harassment online. Credit: Via Instagram
The harassment
In February 2025, the Santa Cruz court issued the first restraining order against Owens. Darcey Arena, her neighbor, requested it, chronicling nearly a year of abuse in court documents. In Arena’s petition for the order, she described a tense relationship with both Owens and her husband that began the night Arena moved into the condominium above the Owens family in December 2023.
In examples of emails, text message and social media posts laid out in Arena’s petition, Owens threatened to sue Arena, have her arrested for disturbing the peace in the Westside neighborhood, and accused Arena of breaking into her home. In testimonies, Arena reported that Owens screamed at her and her guests as they were walking to and from Arena’s apartment, accusing them of trespassing. Owens also filmed Arena and posted screenshots of her to Pescavore’s Instagram account with her address, license plate number and phone number.
The court granted Arena a temporary restraining order against Owens in February, and finalized the order for two years in September 2025. The order prohibits Owens from harassing Arena and her 25-year-old daughter, contacting them in any way, including via text message and email, or obtaining their location. Owens also must stay 20 yards away from Arena and her daughter, their home, their vehicle and their workplaces, according to the order.
One month after the order was finalized, Owens threatened to kill Arena in an email to members of the City Bluff Owners Association that Lookout obtained. “I don’t need a gun. You put your hand on my door handle again and I will kill you with a baseball bat,” Owens wrote.
Arena declined to speak with Lookout due to the investigation.
City Bluff received complaints from Owens about other neighbors, predating her interactions with Arena and going back to at least 2021, according to its own petition for a workplace restraining order granted in September. Later, City Bluff employees became targets themselves.
In the petition, City Bluff said that Owens harassed the association, other residents and maintenance workers for more than a year through constant emails and social media posts, escalating verbal confrontations, threatening that she would use “lethal force” and “stand [her] ground.”
Owens’ nearly daily emails to Sharon Pratt, City Bluff’s legal counsel, over the course of a year included insults and threats of legal action, and caused City Bluff to incur unnecessary legal fees, the petition said.
Owens posted pictures of employees to social media with false and malicious claims, the association said. In one example included in the petition, Owens posted a screenshot of City Bluff President Brian Finn’s LinkedIn profile to Pescavore’s Instagram account and accused him of planning to break into her home and murder her and her family.
The court granted the restraining order for two years on behalf of eight City Bluff employees and its affiliate company, Shoreline Property Management; the spouses of three employees; and Finn’s wife and son. It also protects the owner and employees of landscaping service Habitat Gardens, hired by City Bluff to maintain the condominium where Owens lives, and Pratt.
In addition to forbidding Owens from contacting or coming within 30 yards of the protected parties, the order required that she stop all “misleading or threatening” social media posts, remove the six video cameras installed around her home, stop using screenshots from the video cameras to harass the individuals, and disclose whether she owned any firearms.
But Owens is charged with violating this and other court orders more than 30 times, allegations she will answer in court in January. As of the arraignment on Dec. 5, Owens admitted she had not removed the security cameras.
Throughout 2025, Clarice Owens’ posts to Pescavore’s Instagram account became more violent, and included threats of gun violence. Credit: Via Instagram
Charges of industry harassment
One company that initially invested in Healthy Oceans Seafood claims that Owens harassed and intimidated its 75 employees for more than two years.
In December 2021, Builders Vision, a Chicago-based investment firm, made a $600,000 investment in Healthy Oceans Seafood, according to its own testimony in a petition for a restraining order against Owens, granted in September 2025. Owens had begun to send inappropriate emails and make outlandish public statements about the company and its employees online in early 2023, but, according to the petition, the behavior escalated after the company decided not to reinvest in Pescavore in March 2023. It doesn’t reveal whether Owens’ behavior contributed to the decision.
That spring, Owens began sending unsolicited emails and text messages to Builders Vision employees about topics unrelated to work, ranging from grievances about her neighbors to systemic racism within the seafood industry. At one point, one employee received 72 unread texts from Owens in a single day, according to the complaint.
She wrote several lengthy posts and comments about Builders Vision on LinkedIn and Instagram. Between June 2023 and December 2024, Builders Vision sent three cease-and-desist letters to Owens. In response, according to testimony in Builders Vision’s petition, Owens threatened physical violence against members of the company and their children, asking if they “want their children’s asses beat” and stating that she knows their addresses and will call a “black mob” to their homes.
In June 2025, she tagged a Builders Vision employee on LinkedIn with the message “I’m going to spear and roast [you] like a barnyard animal.”
“The nature of these threats – particularly those involving harm to my children – leave me fearing for my wife, my children, and myself,” Builders Vision CEO Lukas Walton wrote in a declaration in August 2025, included in the request. One month later, the court granted the restraining order for two years, with similar prohibitions as the others – Owens cannot contact, post about, harass or come within 100 yards of anyone employed by the company.
One member of the sustainable seafood industry describes almost daily online harassment by Owens for nearly a year, but says she has never met Owens in person.
In October, Canadian resident Emily De Sousa, who describes herself as a seafood educator on her LinkedIn profile, filed and received a restraining order from the court against Owens for two years, detailing charges in her petition. In an article on LinkedIn titled “Clarice Owens Used Her Company, Pescavore Seafood, to Harass Me – This Ends Now,” De Sousa said that the only contact she’d had with Owens was a brief professional encounter in November 2020, when Owens paid her for two posts on Instagram before a mutual parting a few months later.
At the end of 2024, De Sousa said she discovered that Owens had contacted other members of the seafood industry, media outlets, De Sousa’s business clients and conference organizers who had hired her as a speaker, calling her a fraud, and filed formal complaints against De Sousa with companies she worked with.
Throughout 2025, the language became increasingly violent. In an email from October included in De Sousa’s petition, Owens wrote, “You dumb fat fucking Bitch. Your life is OVER.”
De Sousa declined to speak with Lookout for this story due to several ongoing police investigations. In her writing, she said she didn’t engage with Owens, at first because she hoped the behavior would “fizzle out.” But, in the LinkedIn article, De Sousa wrote that after months of public attacks, she discovered that her silence only seemed to empower Owens.
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Owens’ family members are victims, she claims
Clarice Owens says she is the target of aggressive plots to harm her business and her family.
Her own writing – in posts to LinkedIn and Instagram, and emails to plaintiffs included in restraining order petitions – displays the belief that others want to harm her business and her family. But there is little to substantiate those claims in court documents.
Owens herself filed for restraining orders against Arena and Arena’s daughter in March and July in 2025, after Arena had filed for her own orders. But the court dismissed both petitions when Owens didn’t appear for the court date.
In the two petitions – both 188 pages – that Owens filed against Arena and her daughter, which contained nearly identical examples of harassment for both women, Owens claimed that Arena, her daughter and their guests were using their condo to “torture and harass our only home” with loud noises during the day and night, lengthy construction projects and calls to police, which left Owens’ young son “terrified.”
Matthew Owens supported his wife’s claims in an affidavit included in her petition. He wrote that his family had experienced ongoing harassment, first from their previous upstairs neighbors, and then from Arena and her daughter, including violations of HOA policies, racist materials left on their doorstep and “discriminatory landscaping (neglecting the area around our property while addressing other areas), and snooping around our windows.”
The issues were so severe that they feared for their safety, and City Bluff did not address their numerous complaints, said Matthew Owens.
In a post to her LinkedIn profile in September, Owens outlined a web of connections among Arena, Builders Vision and other alleged assailants bent on destroying her reputation and her family. “Anyone can assert anything to constrain the constitutional rights of people they simply do not like,” she wrote, accusing Arena of “weaponizing” her restraining order.
After a reporter from Lookout visited Pescavore’s Live Oak production facility but did not enter the building, Clarice Owens sent this email to several people who say they are regularly targeted by her. In it, she claims the person “forced entry” and threatens to “spill their brains.” Credit: Lookout Santa Cruz
The harm caused
Owens’ harassment has upended victims’ lives and livelihoods and affected their mental health, they say.
The barrage of messages over the past year seemed endless, several victims told Lookout. “She was posting 24 hours a day at the height of it,” one victim said. “I don’t know when she slept.”
Lookout reached out widely to those who had filed complaints. Most refused to comment, given their fears of retaliation by Owens. Four victims spoke to Lookout on the condition of anonymity. Some blocked Owens from contacting them, but others said that they were advised by their lawyers to keep the communication lines open in order to build a legal case. Some victims formed an informal support group to help each other cope with her behavior and its effect on their lives.
The restraining orders obtained by Arena, Builders Vision, City Bluff and De Sousa did not slow Owens’ behavior, they said. In fact, it seemed to enrage her and make it worse for those who didn’t have the orders. A friend of Arena’s told Lookout that she herself received more than 200 angry texts from Owens in one day after the court granted a restraining order to Arena in September.
It takes a toll on their mental health, they said. “There’s getting to be a level of despair. After a year, nothing’s different. In fact, it’s worse,” said a victim, who said she cries often and has trouble sleeping and focusing on work due to the harassment.
Another person said that Owens contacted her clients and international business associates to claim that she is a terrorist, racist and other falsehoods. Owens sends her vicious emails regularly, she said, adding that in December, Owens told her to kill herself. A cancer survivor, she’s concerned about the effect on her health. “I’m through cancer now, but stress could bring it back, and I’m fearful of that,” she said. “This is very stressful, and I handle stress really well, but I’m at my breaking point right now.”
Police say they can’t do much
Police told Lookout there’s little they can do to stop Owens from contacting or posting about people unless she remains in custody.
“Unless she physically remains in jail, there’s no way we can stop her from committing these crimes,” Santa Cruz Police Department deputy chief Jon Bush told Lookout in November. (Bush retired in December.)
Police have arrested Owens three times at home for allegedly violating her restraining order against Arena, according to police records. Twice, authorities released her after her husband posted the $1,000 bail. The other time, she was released without bail on her own recognizance, which means she signed an agreement to appear for all future court dates and agree to the terms of her release. That’s typical for misdemeanors, said Bush.
On other occasions when police were called to Owens’ home, they weren’t able to make an arrest because she refused to answer the door. “We can’t kick the door in and go get her,” he said.
The police responded to “at least a few dozen” calls at Owens’ address in 2025, said Bush. They document, investigate and collect each complaint as evidence, and forward them to the district attorney’s office for arrest warrants and prosecution.
Peter Esho, the assistant Santa Cruz County district attorney handling the case against Owens, said that it’s important for victims to make reports, even if it doesn’t stop the behavior at the moment. In an ongoing investigation, the office reviews all the reports it receives and will speak with victims to determine if crimes have occurred, he said.
But outside of criminal proceedings, it’s ultimately up to the victims themselves to manage contact with Owens, said Esho.
Owens’ business is failing
At the end of 2024, just a few months after Owens told Lookout that her company was preparing to expand, Health Oceans Seafood’s financial standing began to crumble.
By summer 2024, Healthy Oceans Seafood’s production facility in Live Oak produced 2,000 units of Pescavore tuna jerky per week, and was preparing to expand distribution nationwide. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
In December 2024 – despite receiving several cease-and-desist requests from Builders Vision – Owens sent a letter to her former investor begging for nearly $75,000 in immediate financial support. In the correspondence, which Builders Vision included in its petition for a restraining order, she outlined a cascade of fiscal challenges due to the company’s failure to make timely payments, including cancellation of business insurance, critical outstanding bills and an eviction notice on Healthy Oceans’ office near the Santa Cruz Harbor.
At the time, two employees were working without pay, and the company laid off all other staff and support services to conserve resources, Owens wrote.
In her letter, she also took issue with Builders Vision’s declaration that it would communicate with only her husband and not Owens, calling it “inappropriate” and racially motivated. “My husband, Matt … is white but not actively engaged with the day-to-day operations of the business,” Owens said. “Efforts to bypass me undermine my role, authority, and commitment to the business’s success.”
A December 2024 email from the Santa Cruz Port District, also included in Builders Vision’s petition, demanded $20,940 for unpaid rent from June through December for the harborside office, with three days to pay the entire amount or vacate the property. The month-to-month lease ended in January 2025, the representative from the port district confirmed to Lookout, and the company vacated the office.
A peek inside Healthy Oceans Seafood’s Live Oak production facility in January shows little activity. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
In July, the company that leased the equipment used to make Pescavore’s jerky at Pescavore’s Live Oak facility sued Healthy Oceans for defaulting on the agreement. In a complaint filed with the court, Colorado-based Pawnee Leasing Corporation claimed that Health Oceans hadn’t made a payment in six months and demanded more than $55,000 in damages, attorney fees and other costs. In December 2025, Pawnee won its suit.
It’s unclear whether Healthy Oceans continues to operate, although with a lien on its equipment, no activity at its production facility and one of the company’s owners sitting in jail, it seems doubtful. Lookout reached out to several local grocery stores and retailers that, at one time, carried Pescavore products, and all said they stopped carrying the tuna jerky about a year ago. Either Pescavore had stopped replying to order requests or the stores declined to reorder, they said. Pescavore’s website is live, and lists its products in hundreds of locations across the country.
In November, Healthy Oceans Seafood appeared to still occupy its facility in Live Oak when a reporter stopped by and looked through the window. Although the building was locked and no one seemed to be inside, there were piles of papers, boxes and files, as well as Pescavore merchandise visible through the door, as if someone had left for the day. A neighbor said that activity at the facility slowed about a year ago.
That same day, a woman who said she is regularly targeted by Owens forwarded an email to Lookout that she received. It suggested that Owens had watched the reporter’s visit to her factory play out over her security cameras, and believed that “thugs” had been sent to Pescavore’s facility with ill intent.
“The next person that shows up at my plant and forces entry I will spill your brains,” Owens wrote to her. “Stay the fuck away from me.”
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