No, he did not have sex with that woman. But what he did do was, from a professional perspective, worse. The letter that led to Mark Hurd's ouster as CEO of Hewlett Packard has finally been released.

And it makes clear why HP's Board ultimately fired Hurd and why it had no choice but to do so.

It wasn't the sex (of which, by all accounts, there wasn't much).

It was the dishonesty.

The letter, written by attorney Gloria Allred, alleged that Hurd had sexually harassed an HP contractor by the name of Jodie Fisher, an "adult" movie actress and reality TV star who was ostensibly hired to act as a hostess at HP client events.

After discussing the letter with Hurd and then conducting an investigation, HP's board fired Hurd — not for sexual harassment, but, according to prior reports and a source familiar with the board's thinking, because they felt Hurd had used HP's resources inappropriately and lied to them about his relationship with Fisher.

The events leading up to Hurd's departure are important because HP's board was strongly criticized for over-reacting when it dismissed Hurd. Hurd's sudden departure cost HP shareholders billions of dollars in lost stock value and led to multiple lawsuits. It has therefore always been important to understand why the board did what it did and whether the firing was justified.

Based on the evidence to date, of which the letter is a key piece, the answer is "yes" — the firing was justified.

The day Jodie Fisher and Mark Hurd settled their grievances, which was the day before Hurd was ousted, Fisher published a short note saying that Allred's letter contained "inaccuracies." (She was presumably required to do this to get her money.) Not surprisingly, Hurd's attorney used this note to basically dismiss the letter as fiction when it was released yesterday.

But the letter is 8 pages long and contains hundreds of facts, so it could have "many inaccuracies in the details," as Fisher put it, and still be mostly right.

Click to read the letter that got Hurd canned. And what the letter suggests is that Mark Hurd used HP money and resources to arrange and pay for a series of dates and hotel-room encounters around the world with a woman he had an intimate relationship with. It also suggests that he had an intermediary, his chief of staff at HP, Caprice McIlvaine, arrange all the details so he would be able to deny some of them later. And, in a particularly alarming detail that has previously been reported, it suggests that Hurd told Fisher about HP's pending acquisition of EDS before it became public.

Initially, when the Allred-Fisher letter arrived, Hurd reportedly dismissed it as a simple shakedown. According to The Wall Street Journal, he told board members that he had had a couple of dinners with Fisher but barely knew her and that all of the allegations in the letter were false, including the EDS claim.

Not surprisingly, however, the board launched an investigation. And the investigation turned up information that contradicted some of Hurd's story.

The law firm Covington & Burling interviewed Hurd, McIlvaine, and other HP employees, reviewed expense records and travel schedules, and conducted forensic analysis of computers. And this investigation concluded that Hurd had likely initially lied to the board about his relationship with Fisher.

One of the findings of the investigation, which was also alleged in the letter, was that Hurd and Fisher's relationship appears to have been intimate right from the get-go, in large part because of the startling amount of attention Hurd lavished on her. Fisher's two "interviews" for the very part-time position, for example, consisted of drinks with Hurd in Santa Monica and then a three-hour dinner and drinks with Hurd in Denver. And Fisher's first schmoozing assignment, in Atlanta, was followed by another one-on-one dinner with Hurd set up by McIlvaine.

After this dinner, according to the letter, Hurd reportedly invited Fisher back to his hotel suite to see some "documents" (So cliche as to be almost comical). In the suite, the letter says, Hurd made a couple of passes at Fisher, brushing his hand against her breast, and then asked her to spend the night. When she refused, the letter says, he asked for a hug. And so, according to the letter, began "an uncomfortable dance that lasted almost two years," in which Hurd and Fisher had intimate meals and hotel-room encounters together around the world in which Hurd repeatedly tried to "cajole" Fisher into having sex with him.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Board's investigation also found:

Expense report inaccuracies that, in context, appeared to be designed to hide his relationship with Fisher. Hurd pointed out that he had not filled out these reports himself — that McIlvaine had. But the same repeated "mistake" on the reports — a notation saying that Hurd's dinners with Fisher had in fact been with or included HP's head of security — suggested that, at the very least, McIlvaine was intentionally trying to cover for him.

Two of the tete-a-tete dinners took place in cities in which no HP event took place. These make it look as though McIlvaine basically acted as Hurd's "madam," setting up dinners around the world for him and flying in a part-time employee who had no reason to be in the same city other than to have dinner with him.

For a company as large and visible as HP, and especially for a company trying to move past a recent ethics scandal (the phone-record "pretexting" used to try to figure out which board members were leaking to the press), there's no way the Board could have continued to employ Hurd as CEO.

In short, Hurd:

1) acted inappropriately with a subordinate, one who he may well have hired with this in mind

2) had the company pay thousands of dollars to facilitate this inappropriate behavior, and

3) was not forthright about this behavior when asked about it

Put those together, and HP's board did the only thing it could have: Fired him.

SEE ALSO: Here's The Letter That Got Mark Hurd Canned At HP