Literally anyone with the access to these people would be someone making bank. Do you think Cheryl Sandberg would bother to talk to a poor person?
That's kinda the nature of whistle-blowing. You're complicit, you have inside knowledge and THEN you choose to do the right thing. Snowden worked for the NSA before he exposed their lies about spying on US citizens, you think he did literally no work towards that end before blowing the whistle?
If the author didn't want others to think of her as a "careless person", she should have refused a severance with a nondisparagement clause.
It's kind of the reason C-execs (and up) stay, the company keeps paying them more and more to hold the secrets.