At worst, Ellen Pao is like Michael Brown: not sympathetic, not a victim, but with a story that is still illustrative of systemic bias and wrongdoing. At best, she's a hero for taking on a prominent VC firm and putting her whole professional life at risk. My guess is that reality is between those two endpoints.

First, Kleiner's been playing really dirty. It's one thing to say, "We didn't do anything wrong" and call witnesses to argue that there isn't a persistent pattern of gender bias. It's another to push your own employees (who can't say anything other than what you tell them to, since you can take their jobs away, and most people would rather commit perjury than get fired, because when it comes to he-said/she-said civil matters perjury is almost never prosecuted) into talking smack about someone who left 3 years ago. Bringing her husband and his finances into it is also beyond the pale.

The character attacks being made against Pao are also transparently sexist ("a female chip on her shoulder"). Yes, she played politics, and sometimes clumsily. She probably felt that she had to make many of the moves that she did. For example, her request that Nazre not be fired could have been motivated by a concern for her own safety, or out of a fear that his being fired because of her would lead to out-of-band professional retaliation (against her, or against Kleiner) later on down the road. VC is a clubby world; you can understand why she'd plead for someone not to be fired, even after being wronged by that person.

It's also possible that these two seemingly contradictory claims are true: (a) Kleiner Perkins does not have systemic bias against women, and (b) Ellen Pao was a victim of gender discrimination. (I'm not saying that either is true. I'm saying that both could be true at the same time.) One case isn't a pattern. It might be an isolated fuckup by a now-fired employee that KPCB (out of negligence rather than intentional discrimination) failed to correct. It still needs to be addressed. For example, I might be a person with no pattern or history of killing homeless people (as it were, I am, since I've never killed anyone) but if I go off and kill a homeless person, then I should be tried, convicted and jailed. The lack of a pattern doesn't matter. The fact that you could have 99 homeless people testify that I never killed them doesn't matter. If I kill one, I belong in jail.

Here's how it looks to me: Ajit Nazre damaged Ellen Pao's reputation within the firm, after she broke off a sexual relationship. He used Kleiner's performance review system and its culture to ruin her career. I doubt that its HR system and culture were designed to ruin womens' careers, but that's beside the point. Ill-designed buildings that drop snow or ice on people from great heights, and kill them, weren't designed to murder people, but we still hold the developers and architects responsible for negligence.

After Nazre destroyed Pao's reputation, she struggled to recover and could not. KPCB did not do enough to help her recover; that is clear and obvious to me. It could have reached out and extended invitation to, for example, events like the ski trip and the meeting with Al Gore. It could have formally cleared her name and improved her performance review. As far as I can see, it didn't. That may not have been intentional discrimination, but it was severe negligence. It doesn't matter whether John Doerr is sexist; it doesn't seem that he is. But that's not the point. If KPCB didn't do enough to clear her name, then it should be held responsible even if it was Nazre himself who was guilty of the gendered component of the harassment.