Instead, they decided to portray this as a hostile takeover in order to gather further sympathy from the public at large without providing any evidence that Andrew actually planned this.
Christel could have cleared any misunderstandings to both sides, yet she is the only person who got anything out of this, with an acquisition and a salary, while Andrew is the target of a smear campaign after spending who knows how much money sponsoring freenode for years, and the staff and community had to create a brand new network after spending who knows how much time on running freenode for years.
there were misunderstandings on both sides on who owns what, and actions, while initially well-meaning that were influenced by suspicion and mistrust of the other side. mistrust that was caused by those early misunderstandings.
Christel stepped down, new staff lead shut out Andrew Lee, not realising the depth of his ownership - helped by both Christel and Andrew Lee downplaying it in the past. When it became clear that "Freenode" was owned by Andrew Lee, and not the volunteer run organisation they believed it to be, drama ensued over whether she had the legal right to (probably yes), whether it was morally appropriate to (probably not) and what she actually sold (Freenode runs via volunteer staff on loaned servers, none of which freenode ltd owns or has contracts for, so it basically just owns a domain and a website).
After the legal discussions found that Andrew Lee did legally own whatever freenode itself owned, the staff all quit and formed libera.chat, their own network. Andrew Lee brought in new staff to freenode and some policy changes (notably allowing network ops to reclaim channels that were abandoned as redirects, and toning down the code of conduct portion).
More detailed timeline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236455