Having read this whole thread,I thought I'd make an account and throw out my thoughts on the matter.
Now I don't claim to have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of any of the involved parties past knowing their work from the site,or of any events as they occurred,so I'll try to set any speculation aside here and concentrate on what I have actually concretely seen,to the best of my knowledge.
In my opinion,this a situation where everyone is at fault to some degree. What I'm seeing is unprofessional handling of the entire matter, combined with the easy access of social media and people acting purely from emotion,instead of taking the type to think about what they post. This caused a snowballing effect that made things quickly spiral into a high school drama like situation, then quickly go out of control.
When co-workers do things that upset us, we speak to them about their behavior in a private manner, be it face to face,pm's, skype or whatever; we don't run onto twitter and have an argument with them,or blog/vlog about it for the whole world to see.If comes to the point where management needs to be brought in,we go to them privately and discuss the matter,not blurt the entire thing out onto the net, again for whole world to see.
As it concerns the management, when an employee has an issue (as we did here); it is not appropriate to handle a matter like this on their own without first going through top level management (which if i understand correctly,would be the Walkers).To do otherwise gives the appearance of something untoward going on.
Never in any company that I have worked for have I seen punishments handed out by the HR department acting as top management, this was always handled be the appropriate member of management;even in cases where an HR member might be temporarily in charge, disciplinary actions of any great magnitude were always left for the appropriate management to determine upon their return.(assuming this is the correct version of events)
Furthermore,as it concerns this Kelly; as a member of management she should know better than to be fraternizing around with what is essentially an employee on social media (yet again for the whole world to see);if it is innocent and bears no involvement, which could be the case, the image it presents is very damaging,as we have seen. In this case it is even more so damaging, as it also seems she gives the appearance of friendship of another party who has an issue that would appear to provide a possible motive/connection (the ex-gf).
When it comes to other producers chiming in with their private thoughts on the matter on social media (yet again for the whole world to see), that is just poorly thought out and makes things seem very immature. It not the place of what are essentially employees to publicly "take sides", which can only end in causing a civil war of sorts. They ought to either be trying to calm things down(damage control), or remain silent on the matter, and let the official statement speak for itself,at least in public.If they wish to express disagreement with the situation,or maintain a friendship with either,or both parties, that should be done in private.
