Ask HN: What if Ellen Pao hadn't been CEO?

Pretend for a moment you haven't picked a side pro or con on the Ellen Pao Reddit story and please consider the following hypothetical. Suppose Ellen Pao had been a Reddit product manager (not CEO) who made some unpopular (possibly bad) decisions and then was the subject of numerous disparagements and threats on the company's public forums. Likely Reddit's responsibilities to her under this hypothetical scenario would be large and clear, as Reddit would both be her employer and the host of public forums publishing disparagements and threats. HR training usually describes a large responsibility of companies to protect employees from job related threats and harassment. Now Pau was in fact the CEO, so she presumably had a lot more power than a product manager, and one might suppose is entitled no protection from her own corporation's forums. But is that in fact a point of law? Are CEOs employees in this sense? Given modern corporate structure is the intuition "the CEO is the company" actually correct"?