After days of mind games he finally let me download the database and FTP files (downloading as I speak).
Mind-games: He posted all our emails and made them downloadable to the public in a PDF.
In the first emails at the end I said: This conversation is confidential.
In the negotiations to prevent me going to court with the copyright infringement, he gave me 14 demands I had to agree to. He said take the entire offer or nothing. He requested our conversation to be confidential. He made the entire email negotiation into a public downloadable PDF showing I refused the offer so that he looked good as the person who opened a talk window with an offer.
Two of the 14 demands contradicted each other. How was I to accept such thing without a lawyer? In the first demand, he was going to distance himself from any copyright material of my website creating a new domain name unrelated to mine, and he would start from scratch without any of my material. However, one of the 14 demands is that I would allow him to keep content from 2009 to 2013. Wait ... doesn't that contradict the first one? I am ransoming my database/FTP files backup and I give him in exchange half my content? Had I accepted the 14 demands, he would take that in court to justify he is owner of half my content. Dubious.
So much damage done to me making all this public.
At least I am getting back the content. I havent finished the download, and there is yet to be learned whether he intentionally deleted important things, if he edited some lines of code to give himself access, if there is any malicious virus/trojan, etc. The guy can't be trusted at this point.