So you're implying victims of abuse should never come out or come forward for fear that their abuser might commit suicide?
I firmly believe a victim has the right to hold their abuser accountable. And consequently, with the great power of such a call-out should also come a great responsibility. Especially if the abuser in this situation has a known history of mental fragility and was very likely suffering from borderline personality disorder (a heavily stigmatized mental illness with a roughly 10% suicide rate).
If he was in dbt it's almost definitely due to BPD. Those kind of paranoid thoughts (someone is trying to kill me / someone will kill me through malicious indifference / i will be killed by hateful action) often slowly become self-fulfilling prophecies. BPD sabotages your ability to make friends and romantic partners or keep them for substantial periods of time and ascribes significant blame onto people for (often perceived, sometimes quite real) abandonment or personal sleights. It's usually caused by severe, often-prolonged trauma (he mentions being PTSD, as well) and is a lifelong challenge with a terrifying mortality rate. Underlying a lot of these paranoias is a deeply inflated sense of self - you often hurt others because sleights against you are perceived as unempathetic and malicious and then lash out more than you were lashed upon. However, you also feel intense and unbearable guilt for your actions and others' words and tend to self-flagellate more than anything.
What I then ask of all of you, is whether calling out your rather unstable abuser using your platform of a 100k followers who most certainly won't be nice about it and said abuser effectively being exiled from society
is the wisest approach to get him to own up to his actions. This is what I meant with "accountability" not being the same as "total destruction". We're long past the stage that naivety can be considered an excuse here, callouts frequently result in the accused departing social media, losing their job & future opportunities for employment, and significant worsening of mental health.
Alec probably was still a paranoid mess, hard to work with, and constantly feeling threatened to the point he wouldn't let people around him off the hook - but this is shit you handle on a personal level. you reach out to people around him who care for him and keep him in check, form a small network to hold him accountable if he keeps it up, keep a reasonable distance if he hurts you. You
don't fucking blow him up on twitter when you know your voice immediately reaches a non-trivial fraction of a million and will travel to the millions within a day. That repeated attempts to help him didn't work out didn't warrant a nuclear option like this. Give the guy an option to come clean on his own before uploading his wanted poster. Zoe's a person with massive respect & clout within the community - not some nobody - and she absolutely had avenues available to make sure people working with Alec were either aware of or safe from his behavior without doing the equivalent of a public assassination she knew would likely destroy his career. You're accountable for how you choose to go about a callout, especially with that kind of following.
Social media doesn't understand you and doesn't understand your friends, it just understands how to celebrate or condemn. A life is not a like/dislike button, don't put one to that metric. It turns out - weirdly enough! - that total strangers don't know you, and when asked to make an evaluation of your life both can and will file into binary lanes over your worth as a person.