> Mitchell has been locked out of the corporate email since last month after what a source says was her effort to search corporate correspondence for evidence to back up Gebru's claim of discrimination and harassment
It sounds like she dredged through her email, and sent emails she found to an ex-employee. That's probably going to get you fired.
It seems to me like there is no possible situation where searching (dredged is a weirdly loaded word) through ones own email is a fire able offense. In fact, the idea that one can be fired for reading ones own work email strikes me as kind of absurd and unworkable.
Perhaps there are things one can do with the emails you found that are fireable, that’s beyond my (lack of) legal expertise, but searching? That doesn’t seem right.
It seems like she was passing stuff on outside of Google, but then we don't really know the details of those activities to know if it was an inappropriate action.
I assume that there are exceptions. Off the top of my head I believe whistleblowing would be a legally protected use of corporate emails. Maybe there are others, I’m not a lawyer. But I definitely accept that in general sharing work emails without authorization is a fireable offense.
Honestly this whole thing strikes me as something more legally complex than engineers can analyze. I for one want to hear an actual expert weigh in on this, once enough facts are known. Anything else has too high a risk of foolish things being said.
It sounds like she dredged through her email, and sent emails she found to an ex-employee. That's probably going to get you fired.