1. Only if they use non webmail
2. To sell a story. The default assumption should always be that tales like this are false or at least extremely embellished.
If there are several coincidences, then this leads to a pattern of behavior to which a motive can be questioned.
And Traynor reports that when he made his Twitter account private, the harassment moved to other forums: Facebook, blog comments, email.
What more are you expecting him to have done? And why wasn't it OK for him to try remaining open to possibly-friendly strangers for as long as possible? And he's not "screaming" or indeed complaining about anything, he's just describing a chain of events.
He's condensed around 3 years of on-and-off-again harassment and on-and-off-again countermeasures into a few paragraphs. You can either read it charitably, and assume other consistent and reasonable details for things unsaid, or read it in a hostile and suspicious manner (as '@ResistRadio' has).
The whole OP reads like a string of conjectures just like this one. I kept waiting for some firsthand knowledge of the matter, some smoking gun, but mostly it was a lot of innuendo and assumption.
There's just not a lot of "there" there. It sounds more like an assemblage of facts to fit a theory rather than the other way around.