I don't think anybody trusts christel anymore, but I'm not sure why any of the other staff would be implicated in the sale. As far as they all claim, anyway, they were not aware that Andrew Lee believed/claimed he had ownership of the network; and in fact they claim they were all promised by christel that this was not the case.
They knew he got the domain name, not that he claimed to own the rest and the users data. They had his promise that he would not involve himself in the governance.
Said promise is in writing, but only has a few chats message, nothing official (they are a bunch of volunteers doing that for a couple decades as friends, hard to fault them).
Christel seemed to sell out, and when she got kicked out of her op at freenode by other staff Lee came out of the shadows.
