Or someone made an elaborate marketing decision to not have the email sent to TechCrunch team so that then someone internally at aol would leak it to TechCrunch and in turn TechCrunch would be excited to leak it to the public. Thus making everyone seem special and 'in the know' and thus greater chance of it being shared and talked about.

Like here.

Or they explicitly requested TechCrunch to write about it and say it was "leaked" to build up hype.

shhhh