She said that Lane [her and Nazre's supervisor] had responded not with action on the HR front, but by telling the story of how he had met his second wife while they were both working at Oracle. He had been married to his first wife at the time. Lane said that he had gone on to have a wonderful life with his former colleague — and that, perhaps, Pao could have that with Nazre.

But, Pao said, Lane added that she and Nazre likely wouldn’t be able to work together. When Lane became involved with his current wife at Oracle, his wife had to quit. Pao said this implied that Lane was suggesting that she would have to leave Kleiner, too.

“Did you tell Mr. Lane that you were interested in having a serious relationship with Mr. Nazre?” Lawless asked.

“Absolutely not,” Pao said.

Lane then suggested that she and Nazre have a one-on-one lunch to try and figure out how to work things out.

(For his part, Lane said in his testimony last week that he only relayed this story to show how he understood how complicated workplace relationships could be.)

This is vivid, credible, and damning, given that the anecdote about Lane's wife is, after his own testimony, an established fact of the case, as is apparently Pao's unwillingness to continue a personal relationship with Nazre, which is documented in emails.

There are galactic-scale legal resources allocated to both sides of this controversy, so who knows where this will go next. But in the annals of "how not to respond to a personnel concern", this has to be right up there.