Without seeing the full correspondence it’s hard to evaluate for sure, but parent linked to a tweet from the OpenAI employee at the center of the controversy, that’s a primary source you can read and evaluate yourself

Personally I don’t find the tweet a satisfactory explanation of their behavior, it seems like a lot of deflection without directly responding to the specific claims of front-running, and the screen cap of the correspondence doesn’t include all the relevant context. If there was really no bad behavior, why not post the whole thing?