A Lifelong Fighter's Toughest Round

Even her detractors acknowledge that Patricia C. Dunn, the person at the center of Hewlett-Packard's spying scandal, is one tough woman.

At age 12, she lost her father. She later dropped out of college to support her mother. Dunn nevertheless rose to the rarefied upper ranks of the mostly male finance industry. She ousted the former HP chairman and chief executive -- another tough woman -- and assumed the chairman's seat. Dunn fought bitterly with others on HP's board, and despite her avowed preference for privacy, has gained notoriety for backing a rigorous hunt that included accessing private phone records to smoke out the source of news media leaks from the board.

This week, the 53-year-old former HP chairman faced another major blow: She found out she has a recurrence of advanced ovarian cancer the day before the California attorney general charged her and four others with fraud and conspiracy in the corporate leak probe.

Circumstances required Dunn to be self-reliant from an early age, her friends and business associates said, and her diligence and willingness to learn delivered her from poverty to the top echelons of business. That same tenacity and conviction may have provoked the ire of her enemies on the HP board, who say her strong sense of mission -- plug the leak -- led her down an unethical path.

Now she must rely on that same tough quality to survive her two-front battle. She surrendered to authorities yesterday and, after a three-minute court hearing in which she agreed to return Nov. 17 for her arraignment, was released on her own recognizance. Today she will begin chemotherapy for her fourth bout with cancer. She has survived not just ovarian cancer, but also melanoma and breast cancer.

"She's strong," said Alison Davis, who for three years served as chief financial officer when Dunn was chief executive of Barclays Global Investors. "People can be threatened by a strong woman who represents a challenge to their will," she said. "She will stand up to defend herself."

Dunn's personality earned her her number one critic, venture capitalist Thomas J. Perkins, who pinned the blame for the investigative tactics on her, calling it "a Pattie Dunn program, 100 percent."

Sources close to Perkins and his friend and fellow HP board member George A. Keyworth II say the deep rifts between Dunn and Perkins provoked a witch hunt focused on trying to get Perkins and Keyworth off the board.

Dunn, in turn, shot back. "I won't indulge in a chronology of the intimidation, pressure, rudeness and criticism that Tom directed at me, but I will simply say that I have never had remotely similar experiences with anyone," she wrote in an Aug. 17 letter to members of the HP board. The personality differences were "compounded by a fundamental difference in philosophy between me and Tom" about corporate governance, she wrote.

Members of Congress last week hammered Dunn for not accepting responsibility for an overzealous leak investigation, and for failing to heed red flags that the investigation was moving into unethical and potentially illegal territory. Among other things, documents showed that Dunn had authorized a surveillance and sting operation designed to trace the e-mail, phone and in-person communications between reporters and board members.

On Tuesday, the day before her indictment, Dunn was told her Stage 4 ovarian cancer had come back. Still, she's maintaining a tough front. An e-mail she sent to several friends yesterday morning said she found out she'd been indicted while shopping for a suit at Nordstrom's.

Dunn called her new diagnosis a nasty surprise and said that the state attorney general now considered her "a public threat," said John C. "Sandy" Walker, a close friend who has worked as the architect for her two houses. But, she joked, she was engaging in "retail therapy," and talked about her upcoming interview on the CBS News program "60 Minutes."