To hear many journalists tell it, most PR people are lacking in a skill that is central to dealing with the media: the art of storytelling.
This basic but critical talent shapes much of what I do and defines my firm’s approach to strategic communications: getting the facts out, ensuring our client’s story is understood and told properly, and sometimes combatting or averting a negative story by telling a better one. To be clear: this doesn’t mean making things up, veering from the facts, or even shading the truth. It means being able to put together a series of facts in an interesting, cohesive, understandable, and compelling way. This also involves acting preemptively to answer the question “So what?”
As a journalist, you are taught the “the five W’s and how”—to answer the questions who, what, when, where, and why, and sometimes how. In my firm, you are also taught to answer the question “So what?” Why should anyone care—the reporter, his or her readers, viewers, listeners, or anyone else?
This is one of the reasons that so many of the professionals at Sitrick are former journalists with twenty years’ experience or more. We also have a senior member of the firm who is a former litigator. Same skills. They all know how to put together a good story and tell it. Some clients think the former journalists have some invisible pull with their former colleagues, an ability to reach out to some editor by a back channel. Many do, and if they can, so much the better, but my main interest in hiring them is their knowledge of what makes news and how to tell a good tale. Teaching them what PR is turns out to be the easy part. As I’ve already said, it is easier to teach a journalist PR than teach a PR person what news is.
Every big story is a battle among conflicting versions of events. Our job is to ensure our client’s version gets seen and heard. Shaping the story and redirecting it to ensure that our client’s message is told and received requires us to come up with a better story through better facts, a more thorough explanation, and a more plausible alternative.
In the case of Pattie Dunn, that is what we did. We needed to find a new narrative. We needed to demonstrate that what had been reported was wrong, to get the real facts in the public square, and to show what Pattie did and, more importantly, what she didn’t do. That process starts with the same rule most of my cases start with: first, get the facts. Once you know the facts, you can ascertain what is true and what is not, and if the facts support it, you can use that information to counter a negative story and generate a positive one.
For the first few days after we were retained, my team and I intensified our fact-finding mission in extensive briefings with Pattie Dunn and her attorney, Jim Brosnahan. After sifting through the coverage to identify what was right and what was wrong, I reached out to the network of reporters who had written about the case to arrange individual off-the-record briefings. Our goal was twofold: to educate them on the facts of the case and, in the process, to tell them what they had gotten wrong, in the hope that they wouldn’t repeat it. Yet we didn’t ask the reporters for corrections. Ordinarily, if a reporter gets something wrong we ask for a correction or clarification. Here, however, everyone was basically writing the same thing. It would be a daunting and likely losing battle to convince a reporter that not only did he get it wrong, but everyone else had gotten the facts wrong too, and now he alone should publish a correction when maybe nobody else would. Plus, I didn’t want to do this piecemeal. Instead, we chose to concentrate on establishing a relationship. The plan from the start was to use a Lead Steer so we could try to change the direction of the herd.
So during a weekend break in Brosnahan’s trial in San Jose, I flew up from Los Angeles and snagged a conference room in his hotel, using it as a “war room” where Jim and I could meet one at a time with a few select reporters we had lined up for backgrounders. We let them ask almost anything they wanted and gave them direct access to Pattie Dunn’s attorney, only days after the scandal had been splashed all over the front pages of newspapers throughout the country.
I made sure the briefings were entirely off-the-record, meaning that the reporters agreed not to use the information in any way in print or on the air and not to share it with anyone outside their news organization. Any sharing of the information within their news organization likewise had to be treated as off the record. They accepted these conditions so they could learn more about the case from the people who had the inside track. And, of course, if they refused, they wouldn’t get the interview, and the journalists who accepted the conditions would have a leg up on them.
If the information were handed to the reporters on a “not-for-attribution” basis, it could be used in print or on the air; they just couldn’t say who had told them. “Off-the-record” was much stricter and, quite frankly, safer at this point, since we were still in the fact-gathering process. It is mission-critical that anyone dealing with the media understands these arcane and little-discussed ground rules, one of which is you must have agreement before the interview begins.
A lot of people in the PR field would have done these briefings en masse to save time, but as any young associate in my firm could tell you, you can’t really do effective briefings of this type in a crowd; you must do it one-on-one. This more intensive and more personal approach is a staple of my firm. Even when we deal with reporters on the record, we avoid press conferences. As I will tell clients, if they ask, first of all, what happens if you hold a press conference and no one bothers to show up? (Not a risk in the Pattie Dunn case, to be sure.) Second, if you have one obnoxious question and one bad answer, everyone in the room has it, and once it is posted, all of their readers have it—including journalists and bloggers who didn’t bother to show up.
But the most important reason I avoid press conferences is that they are impersonal. I believe it is critical to establish a personal relationship with reporters. I prefer one-on-ones. I like the intimacy and the ability to let a reporter get a feel for my client and understand that my client is giving this journalist his or her full attention, that this interview is special. And the reporters who do their homework, who ask the really good questions, don’t like to share the results of their work with competitors. You can’t serve everyone, of course, but you can pick out the most important ones.
From the pinnacle of business coverage at the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Financial Times, and Bloomberg to the pulse of the markets at CNBC and Fox Business News to the business magazines (Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek), as well as the newer online outlets like CNET and TechCrunch, we kept our network of contacts informed. We weren’t offering them fluff—that’s not what we do. We were offering them substance, the real stuff.
More Than Just Getting Ink
The goal, however, wasn’t just to get some ink. We did everything with an eye on strategy, focusing on what information mattered and which publications would be most effective in communicating which story. Part of this process is figuring out which target audience you need to influence. Jim Brosnahan and I focused on what would benefit the client and, yes, the media. After all, you need to make it worthwhile for them.
Brosnahan also has told people that we study cases like lawyers, trying to achieve total command of the facts, and he praises my knowledge of the law, which I have gathered by working with him and other accomplished attorneys over the years. Jim and I both feel that we make an effective team: I recognize that it doesn’t do any good to win the PR war and have our client go to jail or lose a case and pay a substantial judgment. Thus, while I am not shy about providing my views, in the end, of course, I yield to him on legal strategy and work within his needs. In turn, he has told me he holds unstinting faith in my advice on media strategy.
In the off-the-record meetings that Brosnahan did with reporters, we emphasized how an awful lot of the reporting on the H-P story was entirely wrong. The more we learned, the more we felt the story as reported wasn’t the real story at all.
The real story, I now believed, was that Pattie had been blamed wrongly for actions taken by others. She hadn’t launched the leak-plugging mission, she had acted at the behest of the board, with the full knowledge of the company’s CEO. Pattie had gotten it started as she was asked to do, after consulting with H-P’s security officials, who ran the investigation and oversaw a contractor they had recommended and hired. In fact, Pattie wasn’t an employee of the company and didn’t have anyone who reported to her. She didn’t even have an office at H-P.
My partner Terry Fahn and I also recognized that Pattie Dunn’s personal story, though moving and impressive, couldn’t be used to counter the mounting allegations against her. We would have to be able to demonstrate that she was innocent of that of which she had been accused.
The daughter of a onetime Las Vegas showgirl, Pattie was only eleven years old when her dad, an entertainment booker for casinos, died in 1964. Afterward, she and her mom lived in their car for a while. Pattie put herself through college on scholarship and started as a temp at Wells Fargo’s wealth-management business.
After Barclays Bank bought it, she worked her way up from secretary to global CEO of the unit, a by-the-book fiduciary overseeing a trillion dollars in assets. Pattie also was a three-time cancer survivor, having been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000, melanoma in 2002, and stage IV ovarian cancer in 2004.
An impressive and touching personal backstory, surely, but as I said earlier it wouldn’t help our situation if Pattie Dunn were guilty of all the misdeeds of which anonymous sources in the media were accusing her. This too is something many people both on the client side and on my side of the business don’t understand. An advisor will try to play up how their client went from rages to riches or how much money their controversial client gives to charity, but her rags to riches story or his charitable giving doesn’t matter if she is guilty of what she has been accused of or say, he embezzled ten million dollars as charged. Fortunately for us, Pattie Dunn wasn’t guilty.
So we set out to change the narrative by getting out the real facts of the case, refuting the notion that Pattie personally had caused this mess by emphasizing that she had been directed to use H-P’s internal investigation unit, which hired the outside contractor, and that she was acting at the urging of the board and the company’s CEO, Mark Hurd. The internal investigative unit didn’t report to Pattie. No one did. She was nonexecutive chairman. The investigative unit reported to the company’s general counsel, who in turn reported to Hurd, the CEO. Pattie didn’t even know what pretexting was, let alone order it.
We also let it be known that Tom Perkins had not quit the board in protest over the investigation, as had been reported in the media. He had quit because Pattie refused to do as he had asked—withhold the leaker’s identity and give Keyworth a wrist-slap in private. Instead, at the advice of counsel, she brought it before the board.
This was the new story we would bring to our Lead Steer, the producers at 60 Minutes, if Pattie and Jim Brosnahan would go along with my plan. I also had Jim and Pattie give interviews to two other Lead Steers in their respective realms, the Wall Street Journal in business news and Jim Stewart for the New Yorker in general-interest magazines.
We had learned that in the months since Perkins had resigned from the H-P board he had hired a PR advisor and a former Justice Department lawyer. Terry Fahn had spotted a gossipy item in the New York Times on September 12 that looked like a smoking gun. Perkins’s lawyer was reported to have sent Perkins an email gloating about the bad press Pattie Dunn was getting, celebrating the Newsweek cover and a Houston Chronicle column mocking her. The email’s other recipient was George Keyworth, a close friend of Perkins and the H-P director who had been identified as the leaker. The Times reported that Perkins had forwarded his lawyer’s note to two dozen people, including an H-P board member, H-P’s chief strategy officer, and even the reporter who had written the searing Newsweek cover story. The same Newsweek writer was also at work on a book about the largest private yacht in the world—owned by none other than Tom Perkins.
To some observers this might have seemed a little too cozy. The Newsweek writer, covering a major story in which Pattie Dunn’s reputation was at stake, used as a central source the person who was attacking her, Tom Perkins, whose cooperation he needed for his book on Perkins’s yacht—all 289 feet of it. Some PR people might have seized on this and publicly attacked the Newsweek writer for a conflict of interest. But we didn’t. Newsweek had disclosed the writer’s book project at the top of its cover story. The conflict was there for all to see. It would just look like whining, and it didn’t address the most important question: whether the story was true. While I almost never criticize a reporter publicly (though I will make an issue of his getting the facts wrong) and never make it personal, I would have made his conflict an issue had we discovered it and had Newsweek not disclosed it. Attacking reporters on a personal level may make you or your client feel good, but there is no other upside—and there is enormous downside. Reporters are human; they have feelings. And they wield the power of the pen. Though they would never admit it, they can make it personal too—and the client will be the loser.
Although we could have disputed several passages in the Newsweek story, that was not the right forum. We didn’t want our side consigned to the obscurity of an insert or a correction, preventing us from “breaking” the story in a way that would have the impact we wanted. So we let it go and decided to pursue the Lead Steers we had picked for making our case.
On the day that Pattie Dunn was forced to quit the board, September 22, 2006, Perkins’s lawyer went on CNBC with Maria Bartiromo in the 4:00 p.m. hour, backhandedly praising Pattie Dunn’s “courageous and graceful” act in “taking full responsibility for the investigation that she initiated, conducted, and supervised.” He also gave Mark Hurd “the benefit of the doubt.” On September 26, in an op-ed in the Journal, Perkins’s lawyer claimed that Perkins had resigned in protest, saying it was “unconscionable for a chairman to spy on her own directors.”
Despite Perkins’s lawyer’s comments, Pattie never took “full” responsibility for the investigation. She had not “initiated” it—the entire board and the CEO asked her to start it—and she hadn’t “conducted” it—H-P’s contractors had, at the direction of the company’s internal investigation unit. Pattie Dunn didn’t “spy on her own directors.” In fact, she herself had been a victim of the same pretexting.
Lodging a Multi-Prong Campaign
I wanted to be sure that we could make these counterpoints on critical platforms: in Pattie’s congressional testimony, in interviews with key reporters, in an op-ed under her byline for the Journal, and in briefing producers who were now setting up their shoot for 60 Minutes. In quelling a crisis in the age of the Internet and omnimedia, you have to fight a multi-front war.
On September 28, just six days after H-P bounced her off the board, Pattie Dunn was set to testify in a congressional hearing on the “spy scandal.” Nine other figures had invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, but Pattie refused to take that stance. She felt she had a good counter-story and wanted to tell it. Jim Brosnahan and I agreed and thought she would make a credible, articulate, clear-spoken witness. We began prepping her immediately.
Brosnahan and I worked with Pattie on the written statement for the hearing, an opening salvo of eight thousand words that hit many of the central themes that we had identified. Sample: “I was a director of the company, not an officer or employee, and had no authority to enter into contracts. . . . I did not at any point consider myself [the probe’s] ‘supervisor.’”
Meanwhile, people on the team briefed congressional staff and a few congressmen in the days leading up to the hearing. I believe in the power of repetition: first, you tell them what you will be telling them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you just told them. We also ran Dunn through practice sessions, reviewing answers and arguments and troubleshooting questions. The last session was held in the Washington office of Brosnahan’s firm right before her appearance.
In that hearing, testifying live and under oath, Pattie Dunn simply soared. Poised and calm before a phalanx of congressmen, she more than lived up to the faith that Jim Brosnahan and I had placed in her, coming off as cool, unflappable, authoritative, and at times funny. Here is one of my favorite exchanges:
Dunn: . . . And I would add that I had no reason to think that anything illegal was going on. There were batteries of experts telling me that that was not the case.
Oregon Representative Greg Walden: And I understand that you were advised that way and some of those batteries of experts are now looking for work. And I understand that. (LAUGHTER)
Dunn: I’m one of them. (LAUGHTER)
Moreover, she performed a slam-dunk when Congressman Walden asked why her version of events differed from that of the outside investigator of the leak, Ron DeLia, who had taken the Fifth and refused to testify before the committee:
Dunn: Sir, I am here testifying under oath. Mr. DeLia is not. I think I will leave it at that.
Walden: Well, I’m not sure we can leave it at that. Answer my question about Mark [Hurd’s] role in this. . . . You’ve indicated you kind of deferred to him. . . . What was your understanding of his role in this approval process?
Dunn: This particular element of the investigation could not go forward without his approval.
Pattie’s performance through seven hours of questioning was by most accounts triumphant, and in a news photo of her snapped as she left the hearing room, with Brosnahan and me just behind her, she is beaming in a satisfied, gleaming way. Afterward, I kept her away from the hordes of reporters at the hearing but made Brosnahan available for a fast press conference. Our star client had just nailed it in her congressional testimony, and Jim did equally well with the media afterwards.
The congressional hearing only bolstered the case, I felt, for putting Pattie on 60 Minutes, and after the press conference, Jim Brosnahan and I went to a private, off-the-record meeting with the show’s producer, Rich Bonin, and the venerable on-air star Lesley Stahl, who had flown in from New York to discuss the interview.
Brosnahan knew that putting Pattie on 60 Minutes would be controversial. “This isn’t exactly in the criminal defense playbook,” he said to me. Shortly after I had broached the idea of putting Pattie on the famously aggressive program, he had told her straight out, “Pattie, if we do this, every lawyer that you meet at every cocktail party, no matter where it is, will come up to you and tell you two things: This is a total mistake, and Brosnahan must be out of his mind.”
Then again, Pattie was the perfect witness—articulate, smart, with an honest story to tell. Plus, by going on 60 Minutes, she would show America she had nothing to hide. This was another upside of taking the risk for Dunn. So at the meeting with the producer and Stahl, Jim Brosnahan agreed to let his client be interviewed the following week, on Wednesday, October 4, barely in time to air it on Sunday, the eighth.
That evening at 6:09 p.m. Eastern Time, in the aftermath of Pattie Dunn’s congressional testimony, we put something on the PR Newswire that underscored the differences building between H-P and its now-former chairman. It was a copy of a letter Jim Brosnahan had just sent to H-P lawyers citing “a number of inaccuracies” in the company’s recent Form 8-K disclosure statement (which the SEC requires a public company to file when there are “major events that shareholders should know about”) regarding the leak investigation and demanding that H-P revise it. He wanted a clarification that the probe had begun before Pattie became chairman and an acknowledgment that H-P Security had gotten involved earlier than H-P had previously indicated. He also wanted H-P to delete the false statement that Dunn had heard the term “pretext” at a briefing the previous June. We took this step because we felt H-P needed to correct the record. It had the added benefit of making news: the correction request itself, or any changes that H-P made in response we knew would spark a news story, correcting the record in the court of public opinion.
As everyone prepared for the next big hurdle, the 60 Minutes interview, the Journal’s Alan Murray called me to tell me he was going to do a story on H-P and Pattie Dunn. Though I had promised her exclusively to 60 Minutes, I knew that the Journal was going to write something with or without Pattie, and we couldn’t afford to have her side of the story left out yet again. My approach is always to be honest and up-front with reporters and editors. Dishonesty by omission is not only wrong, it can have severe consequences. So I let Bonin, the senior producer at 60 Minutes, know that Dunn would be talking to the Journal and I let Murray know about 60 Minutes.
Many years earlier, in another case, the CEO of one of the world’s largest companies, embroiled at the time in one of the biggest crises in the world, secretly retained Sitrick And Company to provide advice to him and his chief operating officer, on the condition that no one else in the company could know. One day he called to tell me that Newsweek and Business Week were both working on company profiles and that his outside PR firm and internal people said they shouldn’t tell either magazine that the other was doing a story. Each should think it had an exclusive. “What do you think?” he said. “Well,” I told him, “besides being wrong on about five other levels, one of the magazines is going to publish first—and then the other one will kill you.” The CEO took my advice and ordered his senior PR executive to tell them both.
Rich Bonin was unhappy to hear of the Journal story, but he understood. He wanted his show to be the first outlet anywhere to interview Pattie Dunn since her resignation from the H-P board, but he appreciated the heads-up. As it turned out, Bonin and I got lucky; the Journal wouldn’t publish until the morning after the 60 Minutes interview aired.
Then on October 4, just hours before the interview with Lesley Stahl was to be videotaped in a hotel suite in San Francisco, Pattie Dunn and four others were charged by the attorney general of California with four felony counts. Now the stakes suddenly were higher—anything she said in the interview could be used against her in court.
Nobody Gets Indicted and Goes on 60 Minutes, or Do They?
Richard Bonin feared he might lose the Dunn interview altogether. Nobody gets indicted and goes on 60 Minutes hours later. Yet I now felt we had even more compelling reasons to proceed with the Lesley Stahl interview. It was a chance to preempt the inevitable follow-up stories on her indictment. We just would have to be extremely careful about not giving any answers that could pose problems for Pattie’s defense.
Before I line up any exclusive, especially if it’s on a sensitive issue, I ask myself a battery of questions: Can you trust the journalists? Are they honest, with high integrity? Do they have any hidden agendas? Would they try to make a name for themselves by pulling some cheap stunt? I knew from years of working with the people on 60 Minutes that the answers to those questions were the right ones.
After some discussion, Jim Brosnahan let the interview go forward. This surprised Bonin, and later he would say that decision showed him just how much faith Jim and I had in Pattie Dunn. We knew she could carry the ball. Pattie, for her part, still wanted to do the interview, despite the fresh indictment. She told me she didn’t want her grandchildren to think she had done something wrong, because she hadn’t. She needed to clear her name, and she may not have much time.
Few people knew it, but the indictment wasn’t the worst news of the week for Pattie Dunn. The worst news had come a day earlier, when her doctors notified her that her stage IV ovarian cancer had returned.
On Wednesday, October 4, a 60 Minutes crew set up in a suite at the Four Seasons in San Francisco. I was huddled in an adjacent bedroom with Jim Brosnahan, his partner Raj Chatterjee, and Terry Fahn, transfixed before a monitor and waiting to watch the interview unfold. Rich Bonin stationed himself in the hallway between the living room and the bedroom.
During breaks in the interview, I chatted with Rich Bonin as Terry Fahn showed another producer a copy of his smoking gun, the Times story on how Tom Perkins had sent out the mean email gloating about all the bad media coverage Pattie Dunn was getting. This was a hit job, he reminded her. The interview resumed.
Bonin wrote the script on his flight back East later that day so he could have the Pattie Dunn interview in the can in time for airing that Sunday, October 8, 2006. Most 60 Minutes stories take six to eight weeks to put together; this one took four days.
The night the interview aired, I watched it at home in Los Angeles with my wife, Nancy. The interview opened with Stahl asking why Pattie was willing to be interviewed despite her indictment just hours before. Dunn answered, “I have a story to tell. I’m innocent. I need people to understand what happened, and I’m glad to have the chance to do it.” When Stahl said that Mark Hurd “pointed the finger at you,” Dunn calmly answered, “Well, it’s a mischaracterization of my role.”
Pattie also got in this really good lick: “The idea that I supervised, orchestrated, approved, all of the ways in which this investigation occurred, is just a complete myth. It’s a falsehood. It’s a damaging lie.” The story took up the angle of the personal feud waged by Tom Perkins and his friend George Keyworth against Pattie, with Stahl describing how Perkins had stalked out of the board meeting “in a huff.”
Then came the clincher, the dismount, the ending of the entire piece, when Lesley Stahl, in voiceover, played the cancer card: “Pattie Dunn appeared in a San Jose courtroom on Thursday. She’s not just fighting for her reputation, she’s also fighting for her life. This has all happened as she battles stage IV ovarian cancer.” Then Stahl, on camera, said to Dunn, “And you’re charged with all this. It’s just all piling on you at once. And you’re so strong.”
Dunn: What’s the alternative?
Stahl: Well, breaking down, getting in the back of a closet and sitting there. I can think of lots of things that other people might do.
Dunn: Oh, the Golden Gate Bridge is always out there. It’s not going away. I mean, you just have to fight back.
Pattie’s parting shot may have been her best moment: “Having a criminal indictment is the last thing I ever expected in my entire life. But if I hadn’t had four diagnoses of cancer, I would probably think it was the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone, and I know it’s not.” Cut to commercial. Turning to Nancy, I was surprised to see tears streaming down her cheeks. I told her, “We won.” “What does that mean?” she asked. “It means, we won,” I said. “This interview will turn the tide.” And turn the tide it did.
You could feel it from that moment, in fact. The next morning, Monday, October 9, the Wall Street Journal ran the page-one story by George Anders and Alan Murray that we also had been working on, and it marked another turn in Pattie’s favor. Then two days later came an op-ed in the Journal bylined by Patricia Dunn herself, laying out her story and calling out Tom Perkins directly:
Some have said they feel I have been made a scapegoat. That is not for me to say. What I will say is that throughout the process I asked the right questions of the right people at the right times. . . . One more thing: Tom Perkins did not resign from the H-P board because of concern over the leak investigation—he resigned because he was upset that the full board had been given the chance to decide his friend’s fate.
In the weeks that followed, others came to Pattie’s defense. In mid-November, the veteran columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, in the New York Observer, surfed the shifting tide, writing a column headlined “Try a Little Sympathy for H.P.’s Patricia Dunn.”
On December 8, the Washington Post reported that H-P had settled its case with the California attorney general, agreeing to pay a $14.5 million fine. That is about as much money as H-P takes in every hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. The story quoted Attorney General William Lockyer making sounds of settlement for Pattie, saying he was “sympathetic to her health problems.”
A few weeks later, in January 2007, I set up an off-the-record dinner between Pattie Dunn and one of the most respected financial journalists of his generation, the Pulitzer Prize winner James B. Stewart. He was pursuing a “reconstruction,” a long, thoughtful “it all began when . . .” piece that would run in the New Yorker, one of the most prestigious magazines in the world. A Lead Steer can be a media outlet or a reporter, a columnist or a correspondent. Jim Stewart—a reporter, columnist, and author—is the model of a Lead Steer, respected by his peers and by his readers. People would ask me, why the New Yorker? My answer: because Jim Stewart was writing the piece.
My long-term professional relationship with Stewart aside, Brosnahan and I stayed by Pattie’s side for the entire interview. She was still under indictment, after all. This was something that Jim Stewart, a former lawyer, understood.
Stewart published his twelve-thousand-word epic, “The Kona Files,” in the February 19, 2007, issue of the New Yorker, which hit the stands on February 12. It presented the story fairly and in great detail, giving Pattie Dunn plenty of room to make the case that Sitrick And Company had been building the past five months. Jim Brosnahan, Terry Fahn, and I had spent days going back and forth with the magazine’s famously meticulous fact-checking department. We grappled with 161 questions, prodding and poking at assertions and technicalities and nuances in every single one.
Then on February 27, Tom Perkins put his spin on the scandal in a jocular luncheon speech at a tech conference in San Francisco. “In spite of being indicted on four counts by the California attorney general, it is clear that former Chairman Patti Dunn won the battle,” Perkins is reported to have said. The comment enraged Jim Brosnahan, and me as well, as we both still were in Pattie-protection mode. The next day we issued a scorching response on PR Newswire, noting that Dunn was undergoing chemotherapy and fighting for her life, even as she had to fight criminal charges that were largely the result of Tom Perkins’s smear campaign. Brosnahan declared war:
Yesterday, a man named Tom Perkins attacked my client. He did so unfairly. He did so falsely when he knows she cannot answer him. I am sorry that Patricia Dunn must endure Mr. Perkins’ cowardly attacks, but he has made the biggest mistake of his career. He is a bully, and he is bullying the wrong people.
In Brosnahan’s eyes, Perkins had misrepresented his reasons for quitting, he had hurt Pattie Dunn unfairly, and he deserved to be called out and confronted for it.
A Distaste for Bullies
My own distaste for bullies traces back to my boyhood days on the South Side of Chicago. When I was maybe thirteen, my younger brother, David, nine-and-a-half years old at the time, was beaten up by five boys on the way home from school. David, sobbing, called our father at work. Dad said, “Put Mike on the phone,” and he told me, the oldest of his three sons, “You do what it takes to make sure this never happens again.” “Dad,” I responded, “there were five of them.” My father said, “I don’t care. He’s your brother. Fix it.”
So I took my brother back to the house of the kid who was the leader of the group that beat him up and told him to go up to that kid and punch him in the nose. If those other kids tried to help, I’d take care of them. When three of the other kids ran up to help their leader, I stepped in and said, “You’ll have to come through me,” and they backed off. I was two years older than they were, and that was a big difference at the time.
Even today, I know that sometimes you have to punch someone in the nose, figuratively, to get his attention, and when it is necessary in my work, that’s what we do.
Jim Brosnahan, in branding Tom Perkins a bully, vowed to get him on the stand at trial and cross-examine him, but he never got that chance. Just two weeks later, in mid-March, the newly elected California attorney general, Jerry Brown, dropped all charges against Pattie Dunn. Never mind her battle with cancer—this was a flimsy case. The AP headline read, “California Criminal Case against Former H-P Chairwoman Fizzles.”
A month after the charges were dropped against Dunn, she made a speech at a financial conference in San Francisco. She wouldn’t discuss the case except to say that prosecutors underestimated her: “Little did they know who they were dealing with.”
More than a year later, on May 23, 2008, the SEC found that H-P had violated federal disclosure laws when it had withheld the reasons that Tom Perkins had resigned from the board. The company signed a cease-and-desist order, while neither admitting nor denying guilt. The SEC didn’t impose any fine.
Pattie Dunn lived quietly after the crisis, enjoying her last five years free of scandal and scrutiny. She died of ovarian cancer at age fifty-eight. It was a sad coda to an especially triumphant exoneration. And even as I write this, a wave of sadness washes over me. She was truly a wonderful and special person who is missed by all who knew her.