With bit parts as a barmaid, a housewife and a nurse in assorted B-list movies, jobbing actor Jodie Fisher toiled at the glamour-free end of Hollywood. But the 50-year-old minor celebrity has unwittingly hit the big time by bringing down the chief executive of the world's biggest computer manufacturer.
Fisher, a Dallas-born screen artist who once played a telepath in a Star Trek video game called Starfleet Academy‚ was hired in 2007 by Hewlett-Packard to work at corporate marketing events. She was the originator of a sexual harassment complaint that sparked a chain of events leading to the resignation on Friday of HP's chief executive, Mark Hurd, who confessed to falling short of "standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity".
"I was surprised and saddened Mark lost his job over this. That was never my intention," said Fisher in a statement released through a celebrity lawyer, Gloria Allred, whose past clients include one of Tiger Woods' alleged mistresses and the family of OJ Simpson's late wife.
Fisher, a single parent of a young son, says she did not have an "affair or intimate sexual relationship"‚ with Hurd, who is married with two children. But she did accuse the HP boss of inappropriate conduct, prompting an internal investigation. Directors found that although there was a lack of evidence to back the harassment claim, Hurd had filed inaccurate expense claims relating to meals with Fisher, travel and, in one case, fees for a corporate appearance by the actor.
Hurd's departure stunned Silicon Valley and sent HP's shares down 7% on Wall Street yesterday. The scandal was greeted with amazement in the financial community, where Hurd was known as an effective but colourless manager with a cost-cutting ethos and an obsessive head for numbers. "He was more of a doer – an executor of policy – than a charismatic creator of innovative products," said Tom Smith, of Standard & Poor's in New York. "But that can be quite effective during a downturn."
Hurd won respect for almost doubling HP's stock price in four years and for streamlining a highly complicated business - under his watch, HP consolidated 85 global data centres into just six, and the company integrated several huge acquisitions including the technology services company EDS. As he leaves with a $22m payoff, industry watchers are wondering whether HP will opt for a more charismatic leader, perhaps with similar visibility to Hurd's predecessor, Carly Fiorina, who is now a Republican candidate for a senate seat in California.
"The industry fell pretty hard in the 2009 downturn but it's coming back and HP is holding, and gaining share," said Smith. "They ought to be able to replace a top leader with a candidate of their choice."
HP recently paid $1.2bn for the struggling handheld computer-maker Palm, marking an ambition to make more of a splash in mobile devices. A new $40m marketing campaign under the strapline "Let's do amazing" implies a desire by the company to turn up the volume.
The firm's chief financial officer, Cathie Lesjak, was hastily installed as acting chief executive on Friday but she has made clear she does not want the job permanently. The frontrunner among internal candidates is likely to be the head of HP's personal computer business, Todd Bradley, while a long list of conceivable outsiders ranges from Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook, to the co-head of Motorola, Greg Brown, and even the founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen, who sits on HP's board.
Fisher has resolved her claim privately with Hurd and says she bears him no ill-will: "I wish Mark, his family and HP all the best." But the scandal is the last thing HP needed after a long haul to repair a reputation damaged by a "spying" scandal in 2006 when the company admitted hiring a private investigator who accessed the phone records of board members and journalists to try to stem damaging leaks.
Sources close to Hurd have suggested that any discrepancies in his expenses were mistakes – and that his claims were filed by staff, rather than by Hurd personally. Hurd has paid back all the disputed sums, which reportedly amount to around $20,000 – small fry for a corporate boss who made $43m in 2008.
• This article was amended on 11 August 2010, to correct a heading that referred to Jodie Fisher as a former porn-film actor.