Ellen Pao was also the face of Victoria’s firing (who was actually fired by Alexis Ohanian). Other events outside of Reddit (her failed gender discrimination lawsuit and her husband’s own legal issues) also provided fuel for the then-nascent alt-right movement to position her as a feminist, POC bogeyman.
It is also hilarious reading the things she was vilified for back then. How quickly the “free speech absolutists” revealed their true colors when they tried to make their own platforms like Voat. I remember reading shortly afterwards how the sites became “taken over” by the alt-right as the MAGA crowd got more vocal, but the truth was they were there from the beginning.