New evidence raises questions about how long Mark Hurd knew of Jodie Fisher
Former HP CEO Mark Hurd's assistant has said she alone discovered and hired the former actress as an HP contractor in 2007. But it turns out Hurd asked about Fisher years earlier.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Jodie Fisher story has been running all year: the August identification of Fisher as the contractor at the center of the scandal that ended Mark Hurd's HP tenure, the murky November Fortune reconstruction that conceded only the two parties know the full truth, and the SEC probe into Hurd's exit reported just three days before this piece. Each installment has narrowed what was presented as an abrupt August discovery.
This report cuts against the established narrative from Hurd's own camp: his assistant said she alone found and hired Fisher as an HP contractor in 2007, but Hurd had asked about her years earlier. That matters less as gossip than as a timeline problem — it bears directly on what HP's board knew, when, and how accurately its public account described the relationship.
First-order effects
- Hurd's standing account of the Fisher episode — that she entered HP through his assistant's independent 2007 hire — is contradicted, forcing both him and any investigators relying on it to rebuild the timeline.
- The SEC's ongoing examination of Hurd's exit, opened days earlier per the WSJ, now has a concrete factual discrepancy to chase rather than just procedural questions about disclosure.
Second-order effects
- Oracle, which pursued Hurd for its top job in September talks reported by the WSJ, inherits an executive whose pre-Oracle record keeps producing new disclosures — a reputational liability attached to its marquee hire.
- HP faces renewed pressure to reconcile its official explanation for Hurd's dismissal with evidence that the contact predates what the company's process assumed, reopening the board-governance question raised in the CEO-succession coverage after his exit.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — a CEO departure followed by successive waves of evidence revision and regulatory interest — boards face rising incentive to document executive-conduct investigations exhaustively at the moment of termination rather than defend a fixed narrative.
- The case adds to a growing template where executive misconduct is settled not by one disclosure but by months of competing accounts, making the credibility of each named source (assistant, company, regulator) the real battleground.
The trend: CEO-conduct scandals are becoming extended evidentiary contests among companies, regulators, and the executives themselves, with each new disclosure forcing the original termination story to be rewritten.