Kara Swisher: “Do you imagine you’ve become a symbol of something, and what is it? You lost. But what is the symbol that you were hoping to have happen, and what do you think you represent now?”

Ellen Pao: “I didn’t plan on becoming a symbol…but it ended up that I became a symbol for different things, and the symbol that I focus on is just this person who told her story and allowed other people to feel more comfortable telling their stories.”

A recent retrospective in First Things about former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, ousted a decade ago from the company he co-founded over outcry about his opposition to gay marriage, sparked a chain of mea culpas from bystanders to the industry’s years-long, media-abetted crusade against wrongthink. On X, after Marc Andreessen apologized for “not doing more to support Brendan” during his cancellation, former Oculus CTO John Carmack expressed regret for not publicly opposing Facebook’s witch hunt against Palmer Luckey, who was chased out of the company in 2016 for supporting President Trump. These statements, paired with Google’s recent disavowal of workplace activism, suggest we may have finally reached the end of “tech’s silent winter” — the years of free speech suppression and forced ideological conformity that prevailed from, roughly, the mid-aughts to late 2021, when Elon Musk took over Twitter and exposed the censorship apparatus it had empowered.

If we have, then it’s time for a postmortem of that silent winter, a cultural history and analysis of the key events and players that shaped it. Doubtlessly, one of this winter’s most important players was Ellen Pao, the woman who became a media darling when she sued her employer, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, for sex discrimination back in 2012. In many ways, Pao’s trial and its aftermath marked the beginning of the #MeToo dimension of that winter, an era of highly adversarial media coverage that saw companies from Google, to Oracle, to Microsoft branded as sexist and sued for gender discrimination. Arguably, Pao created the genre of complaint underlying those lawsuits: allege bad experiences at a company, ascribe these to your identity, and demand the company culture change accordingly. It didn’t matter that she ultimately lost at trial, or that she was a deeply flawed figurehead of the movement to root out sexism in tech — the press had decided she was a hero (literally “Silicon Valley’s #1 Feminist Hero”) and brooked no argument to the contrary. The silent winter had begun. Here, we look back at exactly how.

For Pao herself, the trial was a dramatic failure. The jury — six men and six women — listened to testimony for three weeks, deliberated for two days, reached a preliminary verdict, deliberated for two hours more, and finally decided, 10 to 2, in late March 2015, against her claim that she had experienced sex discrimination at Kleiner Perkins. Or, to put it precisely: the jury determined the standard of proof — a preponderance of evidence, a lower standard than beyond reasonable doubt — was not met in any of the four discrimination claims Pao made against KP. The firm had neither discriminated against Pao because of her gender, nor failed to “take all reasonable measures” to prevent gender discrimination against her, nor retaliated against her gender discrimination complaints by not promoting her, nor retaliated against her gender discrimination complaints by firing her. Speaking to the press afterward, Pao kept her remarks brief. “I have told my story and thousands of people have heard it.” She went on: “If I’ve helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it.”

Pao had sought $16 million in compensatory and punitive damages from the firm. Instead, she ended up paying KP an undisclosed sum to offset its legal fees. At Reddit, where she was then a deeply unpopular interim CEO, users celebrated her loss. “Good,” wrote one user on r/TwoXChromosomes, a female-focused subreddit, “she’s pretty much the opposite of what we need representing women in tech.” That June, over 200,000 people signed a petition calling for Pao’s removal as CEO, citing her heavy-handed content moderation and failure at trial. “A vast majority of the Reddit community believes that Pao [is] a manipulative individual who will sue her way to the top,” wrote the petition’s author. A few weeks later, Pao resigned.

But for a select group of observers — the doyens of tech media working at outlets like The New York Times, Vox and Wired — Pao’s loss was not a failure. It was a victory. Kleiner Perkins “hardly got away unscathed” in the trial, wrote David Streitfeld in The New York Times. He quoted Deborah Rhode, a law professor at Stanford, who said: “This case sends a powerful signal to Silicon Valley in general and the venture capital industry in particular. Defendants who win in court sometimes lose in the world outside it.” At Vox, former Yahoo president Sue Decker wrote: “We may look back at [the Pao trial] as a watershed moment.” She invoked former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose 2013 book Lean In had come up repeatedly throughout the trial: “[The Pao trial] will have the impact of a wake-up call…more and more women and men are starting to ‘lean in’ and take responsibility for changing the waters.” Yes, Pao’s suit had failed, Jessi Hempel conceded in Wired two years after the trial concluded, but “one person can rarely blow up – and reinvent – a system, especially one replete with the entrenched racism and sexism that pervade the technology industry.” At least Ellen Pao had tried.

For the mainstream press, Pao may have lost the trial, but she had won something that really mattered. She had started a conversation. About what? Many things, said the media: implicit bias, gender discrimination, wage disparity, microaggressions, mansplaining — “the system that judges women harshly while forgetting the failures of fallible men,” as Hempel wrote. It was, in retrospect, a stunning attempt to rewrite history and fashion Pao — whose case against KP had been riddled with inconsistencies, rumor, and he said-she said — into the figurehead of a burgeoning movement to fight sexism in the tech industry.

As Pao told it, she only decided to file the lawsuit against KP after she heard that three female administrative assistants said they had been harassed by KP partners. (These administrative assistants did not participate in the trial and, as we will see, were never even identified.) Pao had worked at the firm since 2005, when she was hired as technical chief of staff for legendary investor John Doerr. From the beginning of her time at KP, she alleged, senior partners had excluded her from events and passed her over for promotions. In 2006, she began an affair with married junior partner Ajit Nazre, whom she alleged had initially pressured her into sex. (Pao also claimed she had not realized Nazre was still living with his wife throughout their six-month affair.) In 2007, after Nazre and Pao split up, and Nazre allegedly began excluding Pao from work meetings, Pao wanted to quit the firm. But when she heard the administrative assistants’ allegations, she decided to stay, and start gathering evidence. Five years later, in 2012, she filed the lawsuit.

Part of the media’s fascination with the trial, which drew journalists from across the country to San Francisco’s Superior Court, doubtlessly arose from the sheer volume of salacious detail on display. There was the “bathrobe incident,” in which former KP partner Trae Vassallo testified that Nazre had repeatedly sexually harassed her on a business trip to New York and showed up at her hotel room door in nothing but a bathrobe and slippers. (Vassallo claimed no wrongdoing on the part of KP, which apparently fired Nazre after she complained about his behavior.) There was the “playboy plane ride,” Pao’s allegation that on a private jet to New York with KP partners and Dan Rosensweig, CEO of Kleiner-backed Chegg, Rosensweig talked endlessly about the Playboy mansion and porn, apparently asking Pao at one point whether she was familiar with pornstar Jenna Jameson’s pay-per-view series “Jenna’s American Sex Star.” (KP partner Ted Schlein gave some credence to Pao’s testimony on the stand, acknowledging that “Dan is a boisterous type,” though two other witnesses denied the details of her version.) And, of course, there was the infamous Buddhist erotic gift exchange — Pao’s allegation that KP partner Randy Komisar had made a pass at her by gifting her, on Valentine’s Day 2007, Leonard Cohen’s “Book of Longing,” a collection of erotically-inflected poems about the author’s experience at a Buddhist monastery, and then asked her out to dinner that Saturday, saying “his wife would be out of town.” (KP claimed Komisar’s wife had bought the book for Pao, because Pao had given Komisar a Buddha statue as a holiday gift and Komisar felt obliged to reciprocate, apparently on Valentine’s Day.)

The testimony revealed undeniably messy, incestuous office dynamics. Still, many details of Pao’s story didn’t add up. For one thing, no one could ever quite figure out who those three allegedly harassed administrative assistants were. Pao herself testified that she did not know their names, but KP CFO Sue Biglieri recalled that a receptionist had claimed she’d been “pinched on the butt” by then California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he visited the office. But Biglieri also testified that the firm had investigated this complaint and found Schwarzenegger had not visited the office on the day of the alleged incident. And anyway, Biglieri said, the woman who made the complaint was a convicted felon.

Pao claimed she had been passed on for promotions, excluded from VIP dinners, and ultimately fired from the company both because she was a woman and because she had complained about gender discrimination. But KP’s attorneys showed several negative performance reviews of Pao that characterized her as “entitled” and “not a team player.” Pao’s attorneys argued these were biased, but the firm presented evidence of repeated opportunities it offered Pao to improve her performance, including a speech coach, one-on-one mentorship from John Doerr, and generous annual bonuses.

Moreover, the firm’s attorneys asked the jury, wasn’t it strange Pao had waited years to file her lawsuit, only pulling the trigger shortly after her husband, disgraced hedge fund manager Buddy Fletcher, had filed for bankruptcy? Admittedly, the timing was a bit strange; following a protracted spell of legal troubles (including two failed lawsuits for alleged racial discrimination), Fletcher had declared his hedge fund, Fletcher Asset Management, bankrupt in June 2012, a month after Pao filed her lawsuit against KP.

Ultimately, the jury sided with the firm. In post-trial interviews, jurors told the press they had not played the role of “community conscience,” as Pao’s attorney had urged them to do throughout the trial, but rather focused on the evidence at hand. And this evidence suggested that “Pao’s own performance held her back.” But no amount of evidence could prevent the media from lauding the woman they had already anointed as heir to Sandberg’s Lean In legacy, as a hero — a courageous refusenik cut from the same cloth as Jim Crow-era civil rights activists, as Decker implied.

For her own part, Pao appeared unfazed by her loss and subsequent ousting from Reddit. “This is how sexism works in Silicon Valley,” she wrote for New York magazine. She had no regrets about the outcome, she told tech journalist Kara Swisher, and said she might even write a book about the whole thing. (Two years later, Pao did publish a book — “Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change” — which Wired journalist Jessi Hempel touted as the “logical companion [to Lean In]” which “should be read alongside it as a staple in every business course.”)

A year after the trial, Pao retreated from venture capital entirely, pivoting to start a diversity consulting nonprofit, Project Include, to “accelerate diversity and inclusion solutions in the tech industry.” There, she critiqued the industry from the sidelines, publishing pieces suggesting company cultures built around “meritocratic ideals” are “racist and sexist” and encouraging startups to pivot away from tight deadlines and long hours, since these “can feel unwelcoming to underrepresented groups.” She stayed in lockstep with the mainstream party line, writing in 2016 that Project Include would “break off its relationship with YC” over part-time partner Peter Thiel’s donation to Trump’s presidential campaign. (Per YC founder Paul Graham, Project Include had no relationship with YC to begin with.)

What, then, is the legacy of Ellen Pao, at the twilight of tech’s silent winter? Perhaps it’s this: She became a self-fulfilling prophecy, a woman who excluded herself from the industry because she became obsessed with the idea of being excluded. She threw her career away for a fad — #MeToo and the “Lean In” girlboss posture — and made herself irrelevant in service of a narrative that ultimately benefited no one, except maybe the news sites that generated clicks.

–Sanjana Friedman

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to more clearly describe the relationship between a preponderance of evidence and beyond a reasonable doubt.