iJerk? Ex-Lover Says Steve Jobs 'Was Just Meaner Than Anyone Ever Needed To Be'
Oct. 29 2013, Published 10:48 a.m. ET
Chrisann Brennan, the high school lover who had a daughter with late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, paints a dark portrait of the late inventor in her new memoir, admitting that in her exchanges with the tech icon, she thought to herself, "He was just meaner than anyone ever needed to be.
"For all the bright, beauty of the Apple stores, the opposite was true of one of its' founders," Brennan said. "Steve was a haunted house."
In The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life With Steve Jobs, Brennan delves into detail about the awful treatment Jobs put her through when she told him she was expecting their daughter, Lisa.
She said during her pregnancy she was prone to "Tourettes-like outbursts of anger" the mercurial mogul was known for in the boardroom.
Jobs denied fathering the child for years -- claiming Brennan was promiscuous and he was infertile -- until a 1980 paternity test proved him the biological dad. By 1983, the then-multi-millionaire was spending $500 a month in child support while she had to go on welfare to make ends meet.
She said that Jobs, despite his wealth, fought tooth and nail to deprive sharing any of it with her, and that she was told by an Apple source he and his legal team "all celebrated after court proceedings because he’d gotten off by paying … so little."
Brennan said her life was "pretty much unbearable on a daily basis" due to her dealings with Jobs, who in his behavior, was "constantly sliding whistle between human and inhuman," and at some point "lost his humanity."
When the lauded tech genius finally came around to spending his time with his daughter Lisa -- then 9-years-old, she wrote -- the results weren't always pretty either. She recalled one instance when "Steve was teasing Lisa nonstop about her sexual aspirations.
"He was ridiculing her with sexual innuendos she wasn’t old enough to understand … I wanted to get her the f*** out of there."
Of his quirks, Brennan said that Jobs, famously minimalist, was so consumed with staying organized he'd trash things if "he wasn’t using it and if it cost less than $25."
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He also would inexplicably repeat phrases like "forty days and forty nights," and declaring that it was "thirty-nine past the hour."
Jobs died at 56 two years ago following an eight-year battle with pancreatic cancer.
The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life With Steve Jobs is in stores now.
