They do kinda make the journalist look bad. That email exchange opened with a bunch of extremely-loaded questions, and quickly transitioned into the journalist actively advocating for the transfer of the domain, and using "I'm going to report about this" as a threat.

Plus, I can find absolutely zero evidence of the existence of a German journalist called "Mirai F", so I'm a bit suspicious. (It might be the "PuPRed" person being maybe-doxxed -- but that's a blog site which entirely consists of a single article about PuTTY, so I'm not convinced "journalist" applies in a meaningful sense.)

The Bitvise answers also don't look good, of course. Nobody comes out of that one smelling like roses.

I say this as someone who thinks putty.org was pretty sketchy before it went full anti-vax, and is currently looking like a slam-dunk example of the kind of thing trademark law was meant for.