The only trace I can find of that group/team/whatever is that she leads^Wled it. What does it do?
> in order to stay at the company, she would have to “abandon” her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University.
So side gigs need approval, and if there's a conflict of interest (such as: preventing your employer from building something that looks similar to your side gig) you'll be asked which side you're on. Sounds pretty normal to me.
The rhetoric in the article actually implies that this was an existing thing that only became a problem once she started protesting about google's generous severance package to an employee who was found to be sexually harassing co workers, and the lack of resources to the victims of sexual assault/harassment at the google workplace.
That's the thing about retaliation. Unless the retaliator is really bad at this, it is always going to look gray-area, because you're shading available policy to reach a desired outcome.
You want to do it that way precisely because it plays on some peoples' preconceptions, completely aside from not breaking black-letter law.
A lot of folks will see a enviable company, assume the Powers that Be must get most of it right, and assume the person they already knew was a troublemaker (they were contradicting their betters, weren't they?) was also bad at their job.