An anonymous former student posted the inside of David Najar’s school: a Discord channel “to support reckless ben,” a comment drive Myra Nishizaki ran with shared logins, and recordings of Najar telling his class that Reckless Ben “ghosted us.” The voice is his.

A throwaway account posted thirty-eight images, thirty-six of them screenshots from the Discord of Prakses, the Santa Clarita college-prep program David Najar runs with Myra Nishizaki, and three recordings, from the program’s Zoom by their stamps, of Najar speaking to his students. The screenshots show a channel opened on June 4 “to support reckless ben,” students asked to edit and promote, and, on October 22, a comment drive with shared Instagram and TikTok logins and a screenshot asked for of every comment. The recordings carry Najar’s voice, matched by this site to his own video, telling his students on October 27 that “We still have access to his email,” that “USC is going to break it,” and that the Drudge Report would carry the story within two weeks. That evening, in BJC Live Show’s chat, Nishizaki called the recordings “illegally obtained” and promised a lawyer “next week,” and one of the women who accused the guru asked her to stop.

On the morning of October 30, 2026, an account created for the purpose posted to a small subreddit about this case under the title I Was One of Cockroach Octopus’s “Humans”. The author said they were a former student of David Najar’s after-school program, that the text had been “edited with the help of AI to reduce the likelihood of my writing style being recognized by David,” and that a current student had supplied the material. The material is the point. Thirty-eight screenshots, most of them from the program’s Discord server, and three recordings from the program’s own Zoom account show, from the inside, how the people Reckless Ben’s documentaries call the whistleblowers ran their side of the story: through a classroom. This site pulled every file the post linked, checked each against what the record already holds, and serves what survives that check below.

Nishizaki, on DiscordNajar, on Discord and on Zoom

The recordings

Three clips from the program’s own Zoom, and whose voice is on them.

The post links three clips on Streamable, uploaded there at 12:30 and 12:33 a.m. PDT on October 30, about a hundred minutes before the post. Each carries Zoom’s own burned-in recording timestamp, the kind a host’s recording adds when the option is on, and a participant label reading “akses prepper,” its first letters cropped. The two August clips are stamped August 27, 2026, at 18:39 and 19:08; the third is stamped October 27, 2026, from 20:28:33 to about 20:32, and shows no camera, only a Chrome window being shared. The program’s own announcement of October 12 tells absent students to confirm in a Discord channel named #class-recordings. By their stamps and host label, the files are the program’s own recordings, not a student’s phone.

Whose voice is it? The clips never say a name. This site ran a speaker-recognition pipeline, an ECAPA-TDNN model of the kind used in forensic voice comparison, over each clip’s dominant speaker and three references: Najar on the video call in Reckless Ben’s October 11 video, Najar in a second passage of the same video, and the narration of his own October 22 video, which this site reported as his. The control was a reference sample of Reckless Ben’s voice. The references agree with one another (0.667 between the call and the narration; 0.932 between the two call passages). Against the narration the three clips score 0.781, 0.805 and 0.753; against the call, 0.553, 0.680 and 0.596; against Reckless Ben, -0.011, 0.042 and 0.142. The pipeline’s same-condition threshold is 0.45 and its noise floor 0.35. The same voice, by a wide margin: confirmed. The method is a speaker-recognition model, not a court-certified identification; the script and the numbers are in the exhibits.

What he says. On August 27, hours after the first documentary went public: “You know, stay close, dude, we’re going to be sued tomorrow”; the documentary “is up on Patreon” and “going to drop tomorrow on YouTube”; “we’re going to have to break things”; “sometimes that means pretending to be a DoorDash driver to get on the second floor”; “we can’t follow all the rules right now.” Later that evening, asked by a student about Nishizaki’s name being visible: “No, Ben fucked up and should have got rid of her last name. He fucked up. He’s redoing it. He’s blurring me more.” Then: “If somebody wants to find me, they can find me online because of the lawsuits, but I’m going to lock the lawsuits down” (the dockets of both suits remain public as read October 31, 2026); and, on the building, “we’re getting key fobs for everybody.” He also says he is having tattoos removed, among them “my PhD, Praxis and GPA.”

On October 27, to the class: “Do you guys all know that Reckless Ben has gone completely silent and ghosted us? But he hasn’t fully ghosted us. We still have access to his email. CAA has stopped him from talking to us. So we have to break it through young people, and USC is going to break it.” He names no one at USC; he says “two of our students” will break it, that he is “also talking to one other huge news organization” with “a 24-hour deadline,” and, with the Drudge Report’s traffic counter on the shared screen, “In the next two weeks, it’ll be the main headline right here.” On the fundraiser: “we tried with the GoFundMe. I’m taking it down. Because the point is, is that Ben left us out to dry.” And at the end: “is anybody interested in maybe going to USC and getting a full ride? Work on this.”

What “access to his email” means, the clip does not say. The plain reading is that they can still write to him; the clip says nothing more, and this site has asked neither man. His account that “CAA has stopped him from talking to us” is the account Nishizaki’s fundraiser gave the public on October 22 (“Ben gave us the receipt”), the same side twice. As of October 30 there is nothing at USC’s student outlets or on the Drudge Report about this story.

The response, in BJC’s chat

Nishizaki answers the post and the recordings on October 30, and an account in the name of one of the women who accused the guru asks her to stop.

Watch · BJC Live Show · October 30, 2026

“*BREAKING* Reckless Ben ‘WHISTLEBLOWER’ *EXPOSED* By Former Student!!”

Streamed live 6:23 p.m. EDT to about 10:12 p.m. EDT, 3 hours 48 minutes; 4,114 views by 10:20 p.m. EDT; the description links the Reddit post · YouTube

In the chat: 53 min Nishizaki’s account begins · 94 min “we will have a lawyer next week” · 96 min “Myra- this is Kate!”

On the evening of October 30, BJC Live Show streamed on the post. In the stream’s live chat the account @myrawhistleblower, the account this site found to be Nishizaki’s when it appeared in the same chat on October 24, answered. On the recordings: “Where did you obtain recordings only accessible to enrolled students? This is illegally obtained.” On the stream: “you are clearlly pushing false narratives to drum up drama and collect donos”; “you have your facts wrong”; “I did make the choice. I speak for myself. I chose to whistleblow. Stop putting words in my mouth and spreading misinformation.” On what comes next: “we will have a lawyer next week. discovery will be interesting with you. can’t wait. get ready for YOUR emails to be on display. consequences. consequences.” And: “you should work with Peter. we know who you are working with. we will out you”; “you’re playing right into the hands of the cult and pedophiles.”

In the same chat, under the name @kateatonnessen: “Myra- this is Kate! No one is working with anyone- you two are just upsetting us and. We asking you to stop and you wont!!!!!!!!” The name is Kate Tonnessen’s, one of the three former residents of the Texas ashram whose complaints brought Prakashanand Saraswati to trial in 2011; the jury convicted him on two of the women’s accounts, hers being barred by time, and she has spoken publicly under her name since. This site has not confirmed that the account is hers; the name and the message are all that say so. If it is, “us,” in that chat, reads as the guru’s accusers.

Her words on the recordings settle one question this page had left open. The clips were, she says, “only accessible to enrolled students”: the program’s own recordings, as the stamps and the host label indicated. Whether a student’s passing them on was unlawful is her claim; the recordings were made by the program, of its own classes, and carry its own timestamp. Her threat of a lawyer and of discovery is noted here as her statement; her reference to another woman’s “lived experience” and her “we will out you” are quoted as posted. This page first quoted the chat from screenshots supplied to this site while the stream was live. Times in this section are Eastern, the stream’s own zone. The stream ran from 6:23 p.m. EDT to about 10:12 p.m. EDT; its chat replay, pulled at 10:31 p.m. EDT, carries every line quoted here word for word, posted between 7:16 and 8:00 p.m. EDT, and more from both accounts. Nishizaki’s, on the recordings again: “they are not public records.”; “they are private recordings”. The same account’s, at 8:04 p.m. EDT: “You two are scaring me! We dont want your insanity near our story!!!! Stop!!! Im begging you!!”

Every message the two accounts posted in the stream’s chat, from the replay, in order. Other accounts’ messages, including the ones these answer, are not reproduced; the replay has no threading, so a reply reads as a reply only by its timing. The same list is exhibit 44.

The Discord, June to October

What the adults asked for.

The channel came first. On June 4, 2026, at 1:50 p.m. PDT, Nishizaki posted to a channel named #cockroach-octopus-project: “@here hey all, here is the private channel to support reckless ben. I can add people as we go.” The links under it were to Reckless Ben’s other story, about a Lego retailer, and the first tasks were for it: a banner for a fundraiser, “how to rent an ice cream truck,” a lemonade stand. On June 5 she wrote that she had “just got off a call with reckless” and that “he loves the lemonade stand idea!” The channel bore the name nearly three months before Najar took it on camera at the start of the second documentary.

By July the work was the Ideal Living story. A poll on July 15 asked who could “attend an extra work session tomorrow from 6-8pm to work on the new Reckless Ben intro”; sixteen voted. On July 17 Nishizaki told the storytelling channel that “david is reaching out to ben today” and invited everyone to “the legal cohort with david” where “he’s going to be doing storytelling and legal around the story.” On August 24 she posted texts she headed “from ben.”: he and “the animators might need one more day,” “tracking the face blurs takes forever and blurring your name on the FaceTimes,” and an invitation to a warehouse shoot with “a craigslist person playing Myra and Peter.” On August 31 and September 3 there were a meeting on “the reckless ben project” and a request for help “making a document resource hub of where to find all of the JKP documents.”

On October 11, the day Reckless Ben’s third video dropped, the ask changed. “We need EVERYONE,” Nishizaki wrote in #project-announcements: she and “Cockroach” would be “launching a GoFundMe for our legal fees and Cockroach’s Patreon,” and because “Ben is remaining fair and impartial, so we need YOUR help to promote the GoFundMe and Patreon.” The list: “promote this on social, Reddit, etc.,” “ideate and create viral content for Cockroach’s TikTok and Instagram,” “manage these social accounts,” “help him with future Patreon and YouTube videos.” And: “No one is required to help, but EVERYONE is welcome and invited to.” On October 18 she asked who wanted “the Social Media part of the Cockroach Project” and told the content cohort it could “create epic portfolio pieces here.” On October 21 the Prakses Admin account posted a Google Doc titled “go fund me campaign” and asked everyone to say what they wanted to do “so I can give you the credentials or information you need.”

The server, reconstructed

Every message the captures show, in time order, the students’ words included and their names not.

The captures come from seven channels of one Discord server. The adults post as “myra,” “daveed” and “Prakses Admin”; the students are “student.” Every message is transcribed in full below, with reactions and embedded cards. Times are as the phone displayed them, Pacific. The one message dated “Yesterday” is placed on October 27, 2026, by the day of the capture.

October 22: the comment drive

Shared logins, a list of accounts to reach, and a screenshot of every comment.

At 12:41 a.m. PDT on October 22, the day Najar’s video and Nishizaki’s Instagram post went up, Nishizaki wrote: “@here please confirm you’ll be available to comment in the morning and share with friends tomorrow! please share screenshots of your comments in here as you post.” At 1:34 a.m. PDT: “does anyone else have a reddit account with karma that they are willing to use to help?” At 7:07 a.m. PDT she posted the fundraiser link and told them to “hold off until i give the green light.” At 8:09 a.m. PDT, under the heading “logins:”, she posted the email address and password of the Instagram account and the handle and password of the TikTok account, for the students to use. At 8:42 a.m. PDT she was “working on the message to use” and the “list” of accounts to reach, and had “created a facebook” to post “in a reckless ben group.”

Between 9:38 and 9:59 a.m. PDT, students posted their results into the channel: a reply under Reckless Ben’s second documentary that presents the Instagram account as a find; a repost of the Instagram graphic to a personal story; a comment under a video praising “these whistleblowers.” At 12:24 p.m. PDT Nishizaki posted a view of the Cockroach Octopus video from inside YouTube Studio, with its “Analytics” and “Edit video” buttons, to say she did not see a student’s comment on it. At 12:43 p.m. PDT she wrote to everyone: “We could really use your help beating the algorithms and getting this story ampilfied! No pressure or obligation, of course,” with four copy-and-paste captions. At 4:04 p.m. PDT: “how are the comments going on the videos? can you please share?” A student answered with a number per video. At 4:06 p.m. PDT: “if people can send screenshots that would help so we know who is doing what and who is putting in links.”

Two of the students’ comments are legible in the screenshots. Neither appears today among the newest eight thousand comments on either Reckless Ben video they would sit under. YouTube holds comments that name another account, and a commenter or a channel owner can remove one; the screenshots show the moment of posting, not that the comments stayed. The drive left no trace this site can find on those two videos. It did leave one in the record: the fundraiser report, which reads the Reddit and YouTube comments of October 22 to 25, now carries a note that a comment drive ran from the program’s Discord on October 22, the first of those days.

August 2025: Newsweek

“everyone who hasn’t written Newsweek, do so.”

The oldest screenshot is from before any of Reckless Ben’s videos. At 3:35 a.m. PDT on August 21, 2025, the account “daveed” posted to the server’s general channel a view of his own sent mail: an email from david@prakses.org to seven addresses at newsweek.com, with an open-tracker reporting that the editor-in-chief had “opened it many times.” Above it: “your emails to Newsweek are working”; “keep writing”; “everyone who hasn’t written Newsweek, do so.” Below it, a bonus: “extra points to anyone who glazes Alex,” a young Newsweek writer who “graduated from Columbia Journalism” and had just written that Gen Z was turning right.

Every checkable detail checks. The seven addresses follow Newsweek’s pattern and match seven people on its masthead and staff pages, from the editor-in-chief to a deputy managing editor, a news editor and a correspondent; the writer described holds a Columbia Journalism master’s and published a Gen Z series that month, one part carrying a correction stamp dated August 21, 2025, the day of the screenshot. Karen Jonson, who worked with Najar and Nishizaki on the press from 2023 until September 2025, wrote on Reddit on October 23 that they “had their students sending harassing letters too.” This site graded that as her account. The screenshot shows students asked to write Newsweek, at Najar’s request, with “extra points” on offer. Whether what they wrote was harassing, it does not show.

The notice, the fundraiser, the video

The notice, the fundraiser and the video, as of October 30.

The post includes a photograph of a paper taped to glass: a “THREE DAY NOTICE TO PAY RENT OR QUIT” under section 1161.1 of the Code of Civil Procedure, addressed to “GLOBAL PREP ACADEMY, LLC; DAVID NAJAR, MYRA NISHIZAKI AND ALL OTHERS IN POSSESSION,” under a lease “executed on June 17, 2016.” It demands $29,745.00, itemized month by month from March 2025 to February 2026, within three days of a date written by hand as February 20, 2026. It is a demand, not an eviction; whether a case followed, the court index would show. That evening the Prakses Admin account told the server that “prakses is not going anywhere” and that the two had been “renegotiating our contract.” The notice names Nishizaki, with Najar and the company, as a party in possession under a lease dated June 17, 2016.

The fundraiser Nishizaki opened on October 22 was still up on the afternoon of October 30: $865 of $45,000 from eight donors, the largest gift $500. Its text asks for a legal retainer. The category its organizer chose for it on the platform is “Rent, Food & Monthly Bills.” On October 27 Najar told his class, “I’m taking it down.” Three days later it was still there. The post’s author believes the money is for “personal expenses and non-related costs”; nothing shows that, and the category is a menu choice. The author also says “a fellow peer of mine donated $500”; a $500 gift is on the public list, and who gave it is not this site’s business.

Najar’s own video, the one this site reported on October 25, was public on October 25 with forty-nine comments. On October 30 it returns “Private video,” and his channel lists no public video at all. His Patreon page still answers.

The razor

What the two said, in the recordings and on the server, by whose interest it serves, each against a second source.

A statement made against the speaker’s own interest is worth more than one that serves it. The table below runs that razor over the checkable statements Najar and Nishizaki make in the three recordings and the thirty-six captures. The Interest column is the razor: A marks a statement made against the speaker’s own interest, one that costs them something to say and is weighed heavier; B a statement that serves the speaker, weighed lighter; neutral, neither. Second source is what the statement was checked against, outside the speaker’s own material. The admissions hold up: the rules, the ruse, the exposure of Nishizaki’s name, the offer of a “full ride,” the Reddit account “with karma,” the screenshots asked for. The predictions and the self-serving claims fare worse: no suit came the next day, the fundraiser is still up three days after “I’m taking it down,” the Newsweek story never ran, and the USC and Drudge Report promises have until about November 10 to come true.

40 statements: 11 against the speaker’s interest, 26 self-serving, the rest neutral. “A” marks a statement that costs the speaker something to make; “B” one that serves them.

The post’s claims, graded

Twenty-four claims, beside what the material and the record show.

What this changes

Three things, each on the record now. First, the pages on this site that read the Reddit threads and YouTube comments of October 22 to 25 as public reaction read them beside a directed drive run from a classroom, and say so. Second, Karen Jonson’s account that students wrote to Newsweek has a document behind it, at Najar’s request, Najar’s own post of August 21, 2025; the Newsweek report grades it as her account, and this page grades it corroborated. Third, the pattern. In this site’s judgment, on the facts above and the court record, the two adults enlisted the students of a high-school program in a campaign that was partly Reckless Ben’s and, by October, their own: research (“a document resource hub of where to find all of the JKP documents”), production (“the new Reckless Ben intro”), letters to journalists with “extra points” on offer, and, in the end, a comment drive for their own fundraiser run on shared logins, with a screenshot asked for of every post. The incentives offered were academic: “extra points,” “epic portfolio pieces,” and a “full ride.” The cause the students were working for is the one in which, in 2023, a judge found that Najar had engaged in harassment, including a meeting where he conducted himself “in a threatening and offensive manner,” and in which another judge later found “a prima facie case for civil extortion,” a probability finding on a discovery motion and not a verdict; both findings concern Najar alone and his conduct toward Spiegel in 2023, neither concerns Nishizaki, and neither concerns anything done after the April 2025 settlement. They are at the rulings report. That is this site’s reading of the record, offered as such. What the post alleges beyond it, the material does not reach, and this page does not carry it further.

Sources. r/ideallivingcase post 1xjagq3, I Was One of Cockroach Octopus’s “Humans”, posted October 30, 2026 at 2:12 a.m. PDT, and its record in the Arctic Shift archive of Reddit (in the exhibits); the thirty-eight images the post linked (thirty-six Discord captures, a photograph of a notice, a yearbook scan), pulled at full size from their host on October 30, 2026; the three clips the post linked, pulled from Streamable on October 30, 2026 (titles “10:27:26 Zoom,” “8:27:26 Zoom 1,” “8:27:26 Zoom 2”); this site’s transcription of the clips with whisper.cpp and its voice comparison with the speechbrain ECAPA-TDNN model (script and results in the exhibits); Reckless Ben’s videos of August 27 (18:58), August 29 and October 11, 2026; the fundraiser “Help Me Stand Up to Powerful Law Firms,” read October 30, 2026; YouTube and Patreon, read October 30, 2026; Newsweek’s masthead and Alex J. Rouhandeh’s articles of August 2025; the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing public search, October 30, 2026; Daily Trojan, Annenberg Media and drudgereport.com, October 30, 2026; Karen Jonson’s Reddit comments of October 23, 2026; the Newsweek report, the report on Najar’s video, the fundraiser report and the docket report on this site.

The JKP Map · Prakashanand Saraswati is the only person on this site convicted of a crime.