I've looked into this situation and it's actually a weird gay op being conducted by banned Kiwi Farms user
@Sneeder Griffin, who is mad at Josh and has taken to posting diatribes about him on the splinter forum Onion Farms. It seems like
@theralph was actually
not directly involved this time and it's an example of a banned poster trying to weaponize Ethan against Josh for their own purposes.
Here is the Onion Farms user 'Sneeder Griffin' admitting to being involved in an op spreading purported information about Josh, wherein he discusses conspiring to send it to Ethan and thus supporting Ethan's statement that he didn't actively pursue it:

(timestamp in UTC via archive.is)
Archived source
Here is the same Onion Farms user showing that
@Sneeder Griffin was also the name of his account on
this site:

(datestamp in UTC via archive.is)
Archived source
If you read the email Ethan received, you'll note that the sender's statements about being a banned user from late 2024 track with the date of
@Sneeder Griffin being banned from this site, November 2024. The email also expresses the exact same grievances, almost verbatim, against Josh as
@Sneeder Griffin does in his introductory post on Onion Farms (the second archived link above). The concordance of these factors makes it pretty likely that he himself is actually the originator of the information, is lying about having an outside source to make his claims seem more credible, and sent everything around to hostile parties like Elaine Miller and Ethan Ralph to muddy the waters and cause problems via, essentially, astroturfing claims without any discernible provenance underlying them.
In other words, it's just a half-baked op by another guy with no actual connection to Ethan whatsoever.