The Realest Muthafucka You’ll Ever Come Across Just Told You Exactly Who He Is

Alex Zabel has spent months building himself a costume. Investigative journalist. Objective. A messenger, nothing more, he says, someone who removes emotion and lets the evidence speak. He wrote a whole post about it. Following facts wherever they lead, mentally stripping names from a case so the crime stays the focus instead of the personalities. I read that post more than once. I almost believed it.

He didn’t bring evidence against me. He brought my heritage. Under an account called Criminal Network, he told me my “Iranian and Middle Eastern behavior” was “shining brightly.” He asked if I was in this country legally. He reminded me the United States is “in the middle of a War with Iran.”

He asked if I understood that a keyboard or a phone “won’t protect you in person.” He stacked those into a little numbered list, like a man building a case, except the case was against my blood instead of any evidence.

I was born in Westerly, Rhode Island. I have never been anything but American. The only person who decided my heritage belonged in a missing persons investigation is Alex Zabel. What does any of that have to do with Nancy Guthrie? Nothing. Not one thing.

On his own page, under his own name, Alex has admitted plenty about himself voluntarily. That he lives with mental illness and sees a psychiatrist. That he’s a recovering meth addict, almost fifteen years clean. He calls himself a certified asshole. Says he’s the realest muthafucka you’ll come across. I don’t think less of a man for surviving addiction or managing a diagnosis, I know exactly what that road looks like from the inside. What I can’t square is a person who says he removes his emotions and studies only what actually happened, and then goes after a source’s ethnicity because his evidence dried up.

In another post he laid out his so called findings. That I’ve focused on JLR since February, that I traveled to Tucson, that I arranged a ride along with Tucson PD despite the Guthrie case belonging to the Pima County Sheriff’s Office. That I’m a hacker. That I told Tina Abnoosi he was speaking about her, which led to her attorney sending him a cease and desist.

Not investigators believe. Not court documents allege. His opinion. His name under it. Calling it an opinion doesn’t launder it into journalism. It’s still an accusation, and it still lands on the person it’s aimed at.

This isn’t new for him either. He’s posted bitcoin addresses to his followers, told them these were tied to the investigation, and got it wrong. Money doesn’t move quietly online. An address is either right or it isn’t, there’s no honest opinion version of a wallet number. He put out wrong ones anyway, attached to a missing woman’s name, and let his audience treat them as evidence.

He also told everyone that Kayla Day, Luke Daly’s ex girlfriend, was somehow related to the Guthries by blood. She isn’t. He didn’t check before he said it, or he didn’t care, and either way a woman with no connection to this case got dragged into it because Alex needed another thread to pull.

And when even that well ran dry, when there was nobody left in his orbit to accuse, he turned on Brian Entin. A journalist, not a suspect, not a person of interest, just a man doing the same job Alex claims to do. Alex went after him with homophobic slurs, more than once, out in the open where anyone could screenshot it. I won’t repeat the words here. They don’t need repeating and Brian doesn’t need to see them again. What matters is the pattern. When the case gives him nothing, he finds a person and makes them the story instead.

He didn’t stop with Brian or me. In a public post addressed to Nancy’s daughter, he wrote that she’d had him arrested from across the country after he spent five months searching for her mother, called her a disappointment, and said the case was drifting toward silence while the person responsible walks free. Whatever you think of Savannah, she’s a woman whose mother is missing, being scolded in public by a man who tags the FBI with one hand and tells me a keyboard won’t protect me with the other.

I don’t mind being criticized. I’ve built a social media career on it. If Alex thinks my reporting is wrong, he’s welcome to show his work. Point to the evidence. Argue the conclusions. That’s the job. That’s what any of us signed up for.

What he did instead wasn’t disagreement. It was ethnicity in place of evidence, a citizenship question aimed at a man born on American soil, a grieving daughter told she’s a disappointment, and a felony accusation delivered as personal opinion with his signature attached like that makes it lighter.

So look. Read the post where he calls himself a messenger. Read the one questioning whether I belong in this country because of where my parents were born. Read what he wrote to Savannah. Read the one where he tells his followers, in his own words, that I helped abduct Nancy Guthrie.

Then ask yourself something simple. What kind of man mentally erases names to stay objective and then spends a night building a case out of mine, out of where my parents were born, out of a grieving daughter’s grief? He didn’t lose the plot. He was never chasing one. He was chasing Super Chats, and he lost even those the moment he decided a slur aimed at Brian Entin was worth more to him than his own grift.“

Somewhere between the psychiatrist’s couch he’s proud of sitting on and the fifteen years he’s proud of surviving, he found a new addiction, and this one doesn’t come with a sponsor or a chip to mark the damage. Nancy Guthrie is still missing. Alex Zabel found time to come after me and my heritage instead, on nothing but a hunch and a feeling, seasoned with the particular spite of a man watching his monetization disappear because of his own mouth.

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