The founder of Ambrosia, the failed Silicon Valley startup that charged people thousands of dollars to fill their veins with teenage blood plasma, is back in business. Months after that company abruptly shut down in February following a forceful warning from the Food and Drug Administration about transfusions of young donor plasma, Jesse Karmazin has launched Ivy Plasma, a new plasma therapy venture, this time reportedly offering off-label transfusions from donors who arent exclusively young.

Throughout Ambrosias short existence, Karmazin drew scathing criticism from scientists and medical experts who accused him of peddling snake oil to the desperate and vulnerable and who rebuked him for hawking plasma transfusions, a potentially life-threatening procedure, for unproven, medically unnecessary purposes.

With his latest enterprise now underway, 35-year-old Karmazin seems to be in damage control mode. Last week, nine months after HuffPost published a lengthy investigation into his doomed startup, he sent us two unprompted late-night emails threatening a defamation lawsuit and falsely claiming that a deceased Ambrosia patient had faked his own death.

Our deep dive into Ambrosia outlined a laundry list of issues: its secretive purchase of plasma from a blood bank that recruited teenage donors for saving lives; Karmazins mysterious agreement with authorities to stop practicing medicine in Massachusetts; turmoil among the small circle of people who worked for Ambrosia; Karmazins repeated refusal to release the results of Ambrosias controversial pay-to-participate clinical trial; and his many wild, scientifically unsupported claims about his treatments alleged benefits (including age reversal and near-immortality ) for people suffering from a variety of ailments.

But it was HuffPosts reporting on the death of a former patient that Karmazin took particular issue with. He didnt dispute the fact that the patient, a Georgia man who died unexpectedly at age 65, had received Ambrosias treatment he insisted the man was actually still alive.

I have a rather surprising piece of information to discuss with you, Karmazin wrote. I was recently called by [the patient]. Suffice it to say, it appears he faked his own death he had mentioned some financial difficulties he had encountered, which perhaps might explain his motivation. I have to assume you have no objective evidence of his passing away.

Karmazin was wrong: We do have objective evidence of the patients death, although we didnt include all of it in our article. Prior to publishing, we obtained a copy of the mans publicly available death certificate. It lists the cause of death, the attending physician, the official who pronounced the man dead, and details about the funeral proceedings and burial.

Not knowing this, Karmazin apparently felt that claiming the man had faked his death was a worthy gamble. No patients died after receiving Ambrosias treatment. ... I hope for professionalism and to avoid a lawsuit you will update your article, he cautioned us. As you might imagine the potential damages are quite large.

This is far from the first falsehood Karmazin has been caught in, although it is perhaps the most unscrupulous. By claiming that the individual in question faked his own death, Karmazin alleged that his former patient had committed fraud. That is to say, in his emails accusing us of defamation, Karmazin was defaming a dead man for personal gain. (As he may already be aware, U.S. defamation laws dont protect the deceased.)