SAN FRANCISCO—”I had gone through every possible internal process that I thought I could go through,” former Kleiner Perkins junior partner Ellen Pao told the jury in her second day of testimony on Tuesday. Pao sued her former employer in 2012 for gender discrimination, and after three years Pao is finally offering additional details about how she experienced her final years at Kleiner Perkins, a top-rated Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

Yesterday Pao, who is currently the interim CEO of reddit, described how she started at Kleiner and then detailed how she initially suffered harassment from her coworker Ajit Nazre and later was not offered a board seat with a company she worked to build. On Tuesday, the testimony covered the fallout from Pao’s complaints about these situations.

In 2011, after hearing of some complaints from another female coworker, Trae Vassallo, about Nazre’s behavior, Kleiner Perkins decided to hire an investigator. Pao testified yesterday that she was hesitant to work with the investigator that the firm had hired, Steven Hirschfeld, because she saw on his website that he did management-side investigations, and she thought he would be biased against employees. Today, Pao expanded on that thought, confirming that she wrote a letter explaining her reservations about talking to Hirschfeld and about his investigation.

“You have asked about my experience regarding the treatment of women in our firm,” Pao wrote in 2011 to senior managers. "I care deeply about our firm and our partners, particularly about John [Doerr], who has been a mentor to me… I strongly believe that our interests are best served by forthright discussion." Pao also said that she had heard that Nazre would likely be fired if the investigator found Vassallo’s and Pao’s claims to be true.

In her letter, Pao told her superiors that she had sought the advice of a lawyer, writing “I am troubled that what has happened to me has been misconstrued and misrepresented by others.”

“Currently, I have serious concerns that if I submit to an interview [by Hirschfeld], I will face further grief even if Ajit is terminated,” Pao wrote, adding that "two or three people leaving will not significantly change” the broader tone of discrimination at Kleiner Perkins.

“I believe that the treatment to which I and other women have been subject continues to this day,” she concluded.

Pao, with a lawyer present, ultimately did do a five-hour interview with Hirschfeld. Pao said that the interview felt hostile to her, with Hirschfeld repeatedly asking different forms of the same question. “I felt like he didn’t like my answer and he wanted to keep asking to get a different answer,” Pao told the jury. She added that Hirschfeld was particularly persistent about a complaint that Pao had made about inappropriate conversation that a number of male colleagues and clients had had in a private jet. The conversation, Pao said, was unprofessional and involved the names of porn stars and the sexual relationships of older men, as well as objectifying comments about Marissa Mayer, now the CEO of Yahoo.

“We spent a lot of time on the conversation in the private jet,” Pao said. "He [Hirschfeld] asked whether I remember who they [the male colleagues] discussed, and I said I didn’t remember the names of the people… and then at one point he brought up Sasha Grey, who apparently was a porn star. I didn’t know that,” Pao testified. (Grey has worked in mainstream entertainment recently, notably playing a semi-fictionalized version of herself in HBO’s series Entourage in 2010. Hirschfeld suggested in earlier testimony that the managers were discussing Grey in that context.)

But Pao said that Hirschfeld kept pressing her on the porn star's name, and she said “at one point [Pao's lawyer] said 'enough already, you’ve asked her, she doesn't know, and [now you’re being] antagonistic.'"

No discrimination found

Months later, Ajit Nazre was fired and Hirschfeld submitted his report, writing that he had found that there was no discrimination. (A Kleiner Perkins representative later wrote to Ars to clarify that Nazre was fired because of Vassallo's complaint, not Pao's.)

“When you learned that Mr. Hirschfeld had concluded that there was no discrimination, how did you feel?” Pao’s lawyer, Therese Lawless asked. “I was really disappointed,” Pao said, adding that she thought there “would be some effort to fix the problem.” Instead, she said, she heard from Kleiner Perkins CFO Sue Biglieri that Hirschfeld had expressed an interest in working for Kleiner Perkins as the firm’s HR lawyer, and that signified to Pao that Hirschfeld could not have been objective in his report.

At that point, Pao said she decided to file a lawsuit. “I raised a formal complaint and there was a formal investigation and again Kleiner did nothing,” Pao said, adding that no one had told her that Nazre had been fired because of his actions; he was simply fired.

In subsequent discussions, Kleiner Perkins COO Eric Keller asked Pao what she wanted, and there was a discussion of Pao leaving the firm in exchange for a payment. “I wanted an even playing field for women at the firm,” Pao said, adding that, “I wanted the payment to be enough that it would be a meaningful amount to Kleiner Perkins, that it would show them that it would be painful to not fix problems.”

Pao said at the time she thought that an eight-figure number "would be a meaningful number that would actually hit their radar.”

A changed work environment

Another large part of Pao’s lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins alleges that just before and after she filed the lawsuit against her employer, Kleiner Perkins retaliated against her for repeatedly complaining and calling the firm out. After she filed the lawsuit, Pao said the work environment at Kleiner Perkins became "extremely difficult and very uncomfortable. Partners were uncomfortable talking to me… if I went to their office they seemed nervous.”

In her 2012 review, Pao also said she received more criticism than in previous years, including criticism from two unnamed CEOs that senior partners said Pao had worked with. “I asked some questions about specific feedback, in particular I was surprised that the outside companies said I was not a good board member,” Pao testified. When she asked which companies had complained she was told, “all of the companies, all of my CEOs” had complained "and that really surprised me because I thought I had good relationships with them,” Pao testified.

In the same discussion, senior partner Matt Murphy and general partner Ted Schlein discussed a 60-day period for Pao in which they would review her activities and her progress.

“I was upset and I went to my car,” Pao recounted. "I didn’t believe the feedback, and I didn’t believe the CEOs would be so negative about my performance and I cried in my car.” Then, she said, Pao went back to work.

60 days later, Pao says she was terminated and asked to pack her things. After her termination, Pao started part-time consulting with reddit, a firm that she had invested in, at $600 an hour. After the CEO there left, she became interim CEO of reddit, making $150,000 per year. At Kleiner Perkins, she had made $400,000 per year.

Finally, Lawless asked Pao why she had continued with the lawsuit over the last several years. “It’s been a long journey and I’ve tried many times to bring Kleiner Perkins to the right path. I think there should be equal opportunities for women and men to be venture capitalists, and I wanted to be a venture capitalist, but I wasn’t able to do so [because of the] environment at Kleiner Perkins.”

"I wanted to make sure my story was told,” she added.

Pao will remain on the stand for cross examination tomorrow.