The legal way to handle that is for Dr. Gebru to sue Google and get the emails through discovery. (If Google didn't do anything that Gebru can/is willing to sue over, well, she doesn't have any legal right to the emails.) Exfiltrating confidential documents will get you fired, and saying you did it to assist a friend in badmouthing your employer on Twitter is not going to help matters.
> legal way to handle that is for Dr. Gebru to sue Google and get the emails through discovery
The not-quite-legal but defensible way might also involve openly forwarding those emails to her lawyer. Sending them anywhere else removes the shadow of doubt one needs when strategically but willfully violating a contract.
Multiple external accounts could mean her lawyer's account and her own. Or 2 accounts at her lawyer's firm. So we don't know if she sent them anywhere else.
IANAL but I wonder, would this be a reckless thing to do without encrypting the data first?
In any case, I would not do this in any form unless my lawyer said it was a good idea first.
But I would also not post a poorly worded rant, with strange footnotes, trashing my employer, on my employer's own document-hosting service, and publicize it on Twitter as soon as I suspect I'm in trouble, so what do I know.
[Edit:] I mean reckless because the email could theoretically be intercepted in transit.
The assumption that corporations, not courts, decide legality seems inane to me. The company you worship could commit a crime and then engage in a cover up to destroy all evidence before discovery could occur. The easiest, recent example is Ebay:
If there's a law that permits exfiltrating confidential documents from an employer because you don't like one of their policies, I'd be happy to know of it. But I doubt such a law exists.
