Yes, because they were not peer reviewers, and they had no business reviewing the paper in the first place. She went through the process for internal publication review (which does not involve anonymous reviewers, any more than a code review or a preparing-to-open-source-something review or a branding-guidelines review involves anonymous reviewers), and the paper was approved, and then management told her there was a secret extra process and she couldn't know who was involved in the process.

The paper was eventually anonymously peer reviewed by other scientists at other institutions in a process run by the journal (not by anyone's manager) without incident.