Narcissistic collapse: Yi Zhou’s not-so-legal crusade against the truth

 

I launched my humble blog a little over a month ago. My goal was to tell the stories of injustice that are ignored by the mainstream media simply because the perpetrators aren’t famous enough to generate virality. I am so grateful for the support my articles got among people who genuinely want to know the whole truth, who read beyond a screaming headline of a tabloid. For the brave, determined, caring, incredible people who want to see all the facts!

Of course, the good came with the bad. The heroes of my articles are already known for threatening me with “Instagram attorneys” and such. One of them, the star of a series of my evidence-based articles at this point, has recently given me a front-row seat in her disastrous PR power-play.

On March 17, 2026, Ms. Yi Zhou posted a cease & desist on her personal X page and tagged me:

Now, a proper cease & desist requires such information as the plaintiff’s address, the name of the representing attorney, attorney’s contact information, name of the law firm and attorney’s bar number. What I got is basically a verbal equivalent of angrily shaking one’s fists at me from a mile away.

She accuses me of “unauthorized association” of her with various high-profile individuals, calling it cyber-harassment (guess she thinks it’s an umbrella term for any statement she doesn’t like). Except I provided physical evidence of her associating herself with those high-profile individuals in multiple posts left on her own public Instagram page. A public figure gleefully name-dropping and posting dozens of pictures with politicians and celebrities shouldn’t really be surprised with lack of privacy when it comes to social media and genuine journalistic commentary. Same with the “invasion of privacy” claim: not one thing in my articles was obtained through illegal means. What I use are her own interviews, public record, publicly available court documents and her own public Instagram page. No invasion of privacy occurred… Which can’t be said about her treatment of multiple other people and myself.

This bogus message came from the same person who’s been accusing me of harassment, doxxing (for showing a date of birth on public record), being a commissioned journalist, actually being a public figure she had beef with, and many other outlandish claims. Zhou hates my articles, that’s nothing new, and since they’re based on physical evidence from open sources and she can’t disprove the truth, she had a “bright” idea to try and silence me the way she silenced the first victim of her harassment.

I obviously responded with a demand for retraction, and gave her 7 full days to do so. Over the week, I witnessed a narcissistic collapse of a wannabe elitist who really thinks she can push people around for telling the truth. Here’s how that went.

First off, the bulk of the cease & desist was… AI-generated. How incredibly professional of Ms. Zhou’s supposed lawyer!

Hours later, she deleted it from X and slid into my DMs on Instagram with the same AI-written c&d from a burner account, desperately trying to convince me it was her “legal team”. Here’s how I know it was Zhou herself:

My apologies for the “illEterate”, guess Ms. Zhou’s literary condition is contagious.

It felt very strange to see a supposed legal team representative use slang-type acronyms (“U” instead of “you”, “fam” instead of “family”) and choppy, barely coherent English. The interaction felt oddly familiar… Let’s take a look at some of Ms. Zhou’s authentic comments:

As you can see, it’s the same haphazard, nervous writing in broken English and the very same lingo she uses. Zhou quite literally pretended to be an attorney in an attempt to intimidate and silence me. And not only is it unethical, it is a full-on felony (Business & Professions Code §6125(a) & Penal Code §529(a)(3)).

The theatrics didn’t end there! After threatening me multiple times about knowing my address, phone number, location and maybe even my favorite ice-cream flavor, Ms. Zhou failed to send me her AI c&d via email, because she couldn’t find it…

She began targeting my friends, messaging them with threats at first:

Even sending them deranged c&ds of their own!

“Unauthorized interaction with accounts”. You might be asking yourself, what in the mind police is this even supposed to mean? Is Zhou acting like our mom now, telling us who we can and can’t talk to? Pretty much, yes! She’s attempting to silence people with claims that don’t have any legal weight whatsoever.

Threats weren’t effective, and Zhou legitimately attempted to prey on my friend’s good nature, pleading with her for my email because she was “oh, so desperate to reach me to retract some things…” That would have been believable, had she not posted this a day before:

That is me. My real picture, taken from my Instagram, with a “Wanted” tag added and an outright call for a manhunt made to her followers… Yi Zhou took a picture from my account, very clearly knowing where to find me for direct communication, and acted like she couldn’t reach me. I don’t have her or her “legal team” blocked anywhere. So why not talk to me if she wanted to retract her bogus claims?

I have a theory, and like her previous shenanigans, it’s both unethical and illegal: she was looking for my email to reach out, fish for a reply via email from me and extract my IP address from the reply. Quite possibly, to make physical threats, since IP provides a target’s location…

Despite that threat, I decided to publicly offer Yi Zhou a deal: my email address for the proof of me being a commissioned blogger. She’s been claiming that in every other post on social media, and I offered her to literally post evidence online, for everyone to see. She can crush my credibility with the proof and finally get what she wanted. An easy win for her, right?

Apparently not! 25 hours came and went; no evidence was shown by the very person who claimed to “know exactly who [I] work for”… How utterly strange!

So, I gave her the rest of the 7-day term to retract her unsubstantiated claims, she chose not to. This article, with full disclosure of her conduct, is the well-deserved result. Along with a neat, screenshots-stuffed message sent to the State Bar of California regarding Ms. Zhou’s amusing attorney cosplay.

No one gets to bully people into silence for the “inconvenient” truth. Especially not wannabe celebrities throwing tantrums online. Come for journalists or fans of the people you slandered, and I’ll be right there, documenting your every threat and reporting on your unethical tricks. As any decent journalist should.