by itself? No. But it was one more waste of money that they didn't need. Sadly, TSR, both under Gygax and then Williams, made some bad money decisions that frittered away their cash.... suing lots of people in needless lawsuits being one of them...
No, but it's a truly bizarre continuing complaint I have seen! Look, without going too far into the weeds (as I've been trying to avoid)-
1. These types of transactions are completely normal, especially for closely held corporations.
2. It's not illegal. It's not even unethical.
Now, are there facts that could change my mind? Sure! If she was using this to funnel TSR's money to herself, by paying outrageous sums, that would be one thing.
But let's do a quick comparison (which I am doing by memory)-
Under prior leadership, you had the principals purchase the property that the company would then rent. If this is confusing to you, I'll break it down-
TSR would need new property for its workforce. So TSR would find the property that they wanted to use. Then Gygax + the Brothers Blume would form a partnership and buy the property with a mortgage. TSR would then rent the property from the G+BB partnership.
See what happened there? Not clear enough?
How about TSR acquiring the rights to Chainmail (and other properties) from Guidon Games, meaning that TSR was acquiring the intellectual property of Gygax, which would allow Gygax to get re-publish them and get royalties.
Honestly, so long as these are at market rates ... who cares? Get approval, move on. This isn't like the obscene nepotism that we saw later.
So the reason I didn't go into this is because it's tiring seeing this same thing trotted out over and over again- yeah, so what? This wasn't a factor, at all, in the demise of TSR. If someone has receipts showing that this was some backdoor to funnel money to Williams, then I will gladly change my opinion! Otherwise ...