SAN FRANCISCO — Ellen Pao opened up about the long and difficult struggle that her $16 million lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has caused in some of the most candid moments of her five-day testimony on Friday.

Pao, a former junior partner at the venerable venture capital firm and current interim CEO at Reddit, answered dozens of questions from the jury read aloud by the judge during her last day on the stand on Friday, allowing her to get a last word in on some of the flashpoints of the grueling cross-examination. The high-stakes trial, which has riveted Silicon Valley, has now ended its third week, with the plaintiff's case nearing an end.

For the past few days, the trial has dredged up highly personal details of Pao's life with visible cringing seen at times among court observers as intimate text message or email conversations were displayed on projection screens. It was a safe assumption that this trial hasn't been pleasant for Pao, but on Friday, she touched on it for the first time.

"Litigation is painful and difficult. This has been three years of my life," Pao said. "My information is all public...This is not a good process for resolving disputes. I wanted something meaningful so I could avoid all this."

A juror asked Pao if the lawsuit's attention-grabbing hurt her job prospects after leaving Kleiner Perkins.

"Yes, I did not want to file a lawsuit but I really felt I had no choice," Pao said. "I had pushed for change for years."

Pao didn't ask for an anti-discrimination policy, but Kleiner Perkins didn't have one.

Kleiner Perkins' notoriously tough lawyer, Lynne Hermle, repeatedly prodded at the fact that Pao did not ask senior partners for the company's anti-discrimination policy or bring up human resources concerns when she reported her colleagues' inappropriate behavior.

But on Thursday the court learned from KPCB's former Chief Operating Officer Eric Keller that Kleiner Perkins had to draft a new equal-employment-opportunity policy during a 2012 investigation into sexual harassment complaints because he wasn't able to find one at the time. It's been established that much of the firm's human resources was handled by outside counsel during the time Pao was there.

Pao's lawyer characterized her as a vocal critic of a the company's "boys club" culture, rife with back-door politics and frat-boy attitudes. Part of that criticism centered on the firm's "loosey-goosey" HR policies.

In 2007, just two years into Pao's tenure at the firm, she sent an email to senior partner John Doerr with a handful of critiques Pao had about the company's culture. One of these suggestions was that the firm should treat the entrepreneurs they invest in with more respect: "Don't be an asshole," she wrote.

In following up on jury questions on Friday, Hermle asked Pao wryly whether she was more comfortable including "don't be an asshole" than discussing her HR concerns, in reference to the email.

"HR policies were a tiny piece of it; the bigger problem was the culture," Pao shot back in an uncharacteristically candid reply. "People were not nice to each other, and people were not honest with each other. And throwing in this random, like, ‘let’s get these HR policies' didn’t really make sense."

Kleiner Perkins was in the midst of a "changing of the guard" when Pao started in 2005, she said Friday. Many of the heavyweights who were synonymous with the famed brand were on the way out as the firm was growing rapidly, transforming from a small group of partners to multiple teams. All the flux decayed the company's culture, she said.

Near the end of her tenure, she only stayed at the firm because she was an "optimist" and hoped that Doerr would eventually step in and change the company.

Combative and resentful, yet quiet and uncomplaining

Pao's lawyer spun a narrative that cast Pao as a high-performing budding venture capitalist who was thwarted in her track to the top by the firm's sexism. Hermle combatted it by pillorying Pao's credibility, painting her as incompetent, arrogant and dismissive to co-workers.

Hermle highlighted moments when Pao had acted callously toward others at the firm and, on Thursday, displayed a "resentment chart," a document where she logged her co-worker's supposed indiscretions. In one entry, she called another junior partner, Wen Hsieh, "weak" and said he was wasting her time.

Pao said on Friday that she used the chart as a tool to work through her feelings: "Once I wrote it down and got it out of my system," Pao said. "I certainly didn’t expect to see it here."

The defense has also repeatedly pointed out through performance reviews that Pao was "quiet" and unable to "hold a room." They claim that she didn't object to some of the instances of sexism she outlines in her case at the time it happened.

These scattershot attacks don't always seem to mesh together well. The defense's arguments that Pao is both too combative and competitive yet not bold or outspoken enough can sometimes seem at odds with each other.

Both sides characterized Kleiner Perkins, and the world of venture capital at large, as hyper-competitive and cutthroat, where one must be loud and aggressive to succeed. One juror wondered if, given all these "type-A" personalities, clashes of opinion were only natural. "I think the nature is that there are very aggressive and very confident people in venture capital, and the frustration I have is that behaviors that were acceptable by men were not acceptable by women," Pao responded.

"It made it very difficult to figure out, 'What are you exactly supposed to do?' I'm supposed to be aggressive but then I'm too aggressive. I'm supposed to be less aggressive but then I'm too quiet. It was a very frustrating and difficult environment, and I don't think that's because it was competitive."

A quest for equity or a ploy for profits?

Judge Harold Kahn ruled on Thursday that the financial straits Pao and her husband were in when she filed suit in 2012 were off-limits to the defense.

But that didn't stop Hermle from hinting that Pao had a financial motive in filing the suit. After pointing out that she refused to mediate when she filed her suit, Hermle asked Pao point blank on Friday, "It was all about the money wasn't it?" Pao said no.

On Thursday, the jury heard Keller recount a conversation he had with Pao about her complaints in 2011, where Pao told him that the issues would be difficult to resolve.

"What do you mean?" he recalled asking, since the statement took him by surprise. "Eight figures," she responded, according to Keller.

Pao has consistently defended her suit as a mission to change the culture of Kleiner Perkins and promote equal opportunities for women in venture capital. Earlier this week she said that she just wanted her "story to be told."

When asked by a juror whether her tiffs with female co-workers undermined this campaign, she clarified her definition of equity.

"I didn’t want a supportive and nurturing environment, I just wanted a fair environment," Pao said. "I wasn’t looking for special treatment."