In HP tale, a question of truth or titillation

“Ms Fisher was scared. She was a nervous wreck but attempted to appear relaxed. She sat down on one of two love seats in the sitting room. She was worried when you came over and sat directly next to her and put your arm on the back of the love seat. As you did so, your hand brushed across her breast. ... It happened a second time and Ms. Fisher said ‘you know that you are touching my breast, right?’ You said, ‘Oh, sorry, sorry’ and then laughed it off.”

An excerpt from the latest Danielle Steel or Jackie Collins novel? Hardly. This is a passage from the letter that set off one of the most remarkable tales in modern boardroom history and cost Mark V Hurd his job as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest computer company. A year and a half after the letter dropped like a time bomb on to the desk of HP’s general counsel, the question persists: How much of it is fiction?

Written in a breathless narrative style and signed by Gloria Allred, the prominent feminist lawyer who represents Jodie Fisher, a former HP consultant, the letter was unsealed a week and a half ago by the Delaware Supreme Court after Hurd intervened in pending shareholder litigation to try to keep it secret.

The letter is, to the best of my knowledge, unprecedented in the annals of boardroom history. It purports to convey explicit dialogue: “So you’ll stay the night, right? You’ll stay?” It explores the characters’ inner thoughts and states of mind, even Hurd’s: “You were outraged and felt insulted by her;” “She felt tired, irritated and depressed, sad and mad.” It contains brand name detail like the Ritz Hotel and glamorous foreign locations: “You went in a Town Car from the hotel to the Combarro Restaurant in Madrid.” And it employs rarely used second-person narration, consistently referring to Hurd as “you.” In this regard it joins best sellers like Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights Big City” and Terry McMillan’s “Waiting to Exhale,” as well as classic works by Nathaniel Hawthorne and John Updike.

I have to congratulate Allred — it’s one of the few legal documents I can describe as a page-turner. Stripped of its literary flourishes, it boils down to a supposedly two-year campaign by Hurd to have sex with Fisher, a former soft-core movie actress whom HP hired as a consultant to help host so-called executive summit events for the company.

In the course of those years, Fisher contends that Hurd let his hand brush against her breast, asked her to spend the night with him, asked her to hug him and hugged her while she was dressed in a robe, once put his arms around her and “quickly” kissed her on the lips, asked her to “go away” with him and said he could spend the rest of his life with her. She mentions several occasions when they were alone together in his or her hotel room and sometimes chatted about movies and sports. She insists that she rebuffed all these approaches, that there was no sexual activity and that, as a result, her consulting contract wasn’t extended. Abruptly dropping the role of omniscient narrator, Allred concludes that Hurd’s behaviour amounts to “the most egregious type of sexual harassment.

Taken as true, Fisher’s allegations seem to meet the threshold for sexual harassment in California, which is “verbal, visual, or physical conduct of a sexual nature or of a hostile nature based on gender, that were unwelcome and pervasive or severe.” But Hurd wasn’t forced to resign for sexual harassment, and it’s not clear that the central elements of Fisher’s allegations are true. She settled the matter and promptly shattered her credibility by conceding that the letter contained “many inaccuracies,” without specifying what they were. She has since declined to comment, as both she and her lawyer did when I contacted Allred this week.