SAN FRANCISCO—On Friday, 15 members of a jury (12 regular jurors and three alternates) were given a rare opportunity that had all reporters in the room seething with envy. They were given permission to write down their questions for Ellen Pao, the plaintiff who’s asking for $16 million from her former employer, the lauded venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, holding that the firm discriminated against her because she is a woman.

Kleiner contends that Pao was confrontational and unsuited to be an investor, and that she never clearly articulated what actions she wanted Kleiner to take.

After two days of questioning by her lawyers and two days of cross examination, Pao today turned to Judge Harold Kahn as he read juror questions, and then turned to the jury as she answered them. (Juror questions were vetted by the judge and the lawyers before they were asked, but Kahn said that only one question was omitted because its content dealt with information that was protected under attorney/client privilege.)

And, for the first time in four days, Pao appeared to relax and show real emotion as she answered.

Is it porn or HBO?

”Entourage is not a porn show, but rather a mature-themed show on HBO,” one juror wrote, referencing an incident in Pao’s testimony in which she and a number of male colleagues were on a private jet and the men began discussing porn. Kleiner’s private investigator testified last week that the men were actually talking about a number of episodes of Entourage starring Sasha Grey, who has acted in porn as well as mainstream entertainment. “Were the men discussing sexual acts in particular or merely discussing the show?” the juror asked.

The answer was one that the courtroom hadn’t heard before. Pao turned to the jury and said that on the jet, her male colleagues, “were discussing a different show on an adult network” that involved porn stars competing in performing sex acts for a prize. She said she believed Kleiner’s investigator, Steven Hirschfeld, had pushed the Entourage explanation to make the situation seem less offensive.

One juror wanted to know why, after she was terminated at Kleiner, Pao hadn’t looked for a job at one of the companies she had worked with at the VC firm, if she’d had such a good relationship with them, as she testified. But Pao said that many of the companies she’d worked with wanted to maintain their relationship with Kleiner Perkins. “They were still heavily tied to Kleiner Perkins, they had accepted millions of dollars, even tens of millions of dollars from Kleiner Perkins, and to put them in a situation where they had to choose between accepting money” from Kleiner or not, was not a place Pao or the companies wanted to be in.

Pao added in a later question that after she was terminated at Kleiner, John Doerr took her board seat at Flipboard, Matt Murphy took her board seat at Datameer, and Kleiner dropped her board seat at Lehigh Technologies.

Never incommunicado

Some of the questions seemed to probe startup culture itself. “Was it normal to send e-mails, IMs, and texts at all hours of the day, even during holidays?” one juror asked.

Pao smiled and said that it was. “It’s a competitive industry and being responsive is important.”

In a later question about whether perhaps Pao was not given extra board seats because she was already seen as being “spread too thin,” Pao said that Doerr never gave her that indication. “He would encourage me to get more work/life balance but he would keep giving me more projects. So there was an aspirational goal, but he would still give me a lot of projects… so I don’t think he thought I was stretched too thin.”

Another juror asked if Kleiner had ever passed up on investing in companies and later regretted the decision not to invest. One of Pao’s claims against Kleiner was that she had advised them to invest in Twitter before the company had a lot of funding, and that advice was allegedly disregarded. Pao said that passing up on good opportunities did happen from time to time at the firm, and that passing up on investing in eBay is known throughout Kleiner as a major regret in the firm’s otherwise-good track record.

“Don’t be an asshole”

Oddly, a couple of questions came up about an offhand comment Pao made in a 2007 e-mail to senior managers. At the time, Pao was unhappy with Kleiner and the culture there and tendered her resignation. Senior manager John Doerr convinced Pao to stay, and he asked her to write down some suggestions to make Kleiner a better place.

In one bullet point, Pao wrote that Kleiner needed more “respect for entrepreneurs, (regardless of whether we want to invest in their venture or not) for visitors, and for our partners. Don’t be an asshole.”

One juror wanted to know what Pao was talking about in that comment, with an example of a way that Kleiner lacked respect for entrepreneurs. Pao said that in one instance, she was in a meeting with a team of entrepreneurs who had a nascent company, and halfway through the meeting Kleiner Perkins decided that they didn’t like the idea. As the meeting was going on, the Kleiner partners present started talking about how they’d break up the company and move the entrepreneurs around into the firm's other portfolio companies, in front of the entrepreneurs.

In Pao’s view, this was unconscionably rude. ”Here are people whose hopes and dreams [are in this company] and you’re talking about it in front of them as a failure.”

Another juror asked Pao why she felt it was ok to write her e-mail to Doerr in such a blunt fashion, and if, when she did it, she thought Doerr would fire her for calling him an asshole.

”I certainly wasn’t calling John an asshole… it wasn’t intended to be [aimed] at him” Pao told the jury. “And obviously he didn’t fire me—then,” she laughed.

She said if she could write the letter over again, "I probably would have used the word 'jerk.'"

The jury also tried to clear up some inconsistencies in the record. In 2012, Pao told COO Eric Keller that Kleiner Perkins "did nothing in relation to Mr. Nazre," one juror asked. "But didn’t they try to fire him years before?” Indeed, Pao had urged John Doerr not to fire Nazre in a 2007 e-mail, when he was first reported for harassment.

But Pao suggested that firing Nazre in 2007 wasn’t that simple. “Kleiner Perkins didn’t want to fire Ajit Nazre, John Doerr wanted to fire Ajit Nazre," she said. "Everybody else wanted to keep him." To another juror question on the same topic she replied, with a touch of defiance in her voice, “ultimately they [Kleiner Perkins] did nothing. It really shouldn’t be on my shoulders to decide whether Ajit was fired. I would have carried that with me for the rest of my time at Kleiner Perkins… Ray [Lane] would have been unhappy, Ted [Schlein] probably would have been unhappy.” She added that had she complained and got Nazre fired, that would have been her legacy throughout the rest of her career.

Role reversal

One of the main points of contention in the case has been that Pao claims she did most of the work on cultivating Kleiner’s investment in a patent licensing company called RPX, but when Kleiner was given a board seat, senior partner Randy Komisar, who had actively disdained the investment, was given the seat. Kleiner Perkins lawyers have held that Komisar had years of experience in patent law, and Pao was a few months away from a planned maternity leave.

So, a juror wanted to know, if the roles were reversed, and Komisar had had a three-month leave coming up on the calendar, did Pao think that Mr. Doerr would have given Komisar the board seat?

Pao paused for a long moment. It seemed she had never contemplated that scenario before. When she was ready, she spoke more slowly. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think he probably would have had two board seats then.” Doerr would have taken one board seat, Pao said, “and Randy [Komisar] would have joined as a senior board member,” later.

”Do you think having [Komisar take] a board seat was Doerr giving “fatherly advice”… to enjoy the birth of your daughter?” one juror asked.

”I don’t think so, because he gave me work to do on my leave,” Pao replied.

Later, she told the jury that the rules for adding board seats were too nebulous. First, junior partners were told they could add one board seat per fund, then they were told they could add one board seat per year. “It became clear that others were adding boards more quickly” despite the rule, and then it became clear that male partners were adding many board seats, “and the women were not,” Pao said.

The jury also wanted to know if Pao ever received specific feedback in her first negative performance review for 2011, in which senior partners told her that “all” of her portfolio companies had complained about her.

"One specific example was around a company called UberConference,” Pao said recounting that she had set up a meeting, had to cancel, and then was criticized for rescheduling without inviting any senior partners to the meeting. However, Pao maintained that that criticism wasn’t even valid.

“I was hospitalized,” she said, her voice shaking a bit. “That was a very painful thing for me to hear because I actually had a miscarriage,” adding that she had asked her assistant reschedule the meeting, and the assistant only re-invited people who had RSVP’d already.

"I asked for more examples from board members, but the feedback wasn’t actionable," Pao continued. "They had no examples. They said they would go back and get permission for specific examples, and I never heard back.”

Trust and lawsuits

The jury asked Pao if she distrusted Kleiner Perkins, and if so, “why did you stay in a work environment that you didn’t trust?”

Pao said that at first, Ajit was the only partner she did’t trust, but she stopped trusting Kleiner when she got into litigation.

I’m an optimist,” she said. “I was always hoping that John would step in and manage the culture or tell people to clean it up.”

Pao also told the jury that she hadn't been looking for a lawsuit when she started at Kleiner Perkins. "Litigation is painful and difficult. It’s been three years of my life, all of my e-mails are now public...it’s dragged my friends into this, this is not a good process for resolving disputes," she said, adding that Kleiner Perkins "never had that conversation where they said 'We take responsibility for creating a workplace that is safe and fair.'"

Towards the end of the questions, Pao became comfortable and seemed to speak extemporaneously—a marked difference from the stiff answers she gave on Monday and tuesday when she began her testimony and the stubborn reticence she gave the cross-examining attorney on Wednesday and Thursday.

One juror asked if maybe all Pao experienced at Keliner Perkins was a very, very stressful environment: Is it the “nature of the beast” to have conflicts between partners in a “type-a” industry, the juror asked.

Investors are “very aggressive, very competitive, and very confident people,” Pao said, with an earnestness that had been absent from all testimony in the trial over the previous three weeks. “But behaviors that were acceptable by men were not acceptable by women… [colleague Trae Vassallo] would get criticized for speaking up too much, and being too talkative. For me I was not talking enough, or if I did talk, I was being too competitive or too sharp-elbowed.”

“I’m supposed to be more aggressive, but then less aggressive," she said. "It was a very frustrating and difficult experience and I don’t think it was just because it was a competitive environment.”

Testimony from Pao ended this afternoon, but many more witnesses will take the stand in the coming weeks. Nine jurors out of 12 must agree there was or was not gender discrimination at Kleiner Perkins to issue a verdict.