An eight-page letter sent by celebrity attorney Gloria Allred to Mark Hurd on behalf of Jodie Fisher has been published by Mercury News. Both parties requested that the letter remain confidential, but a Delaware court ruled last Wednesday that it be made public.

The letter has become the the center of controversy during the legal battle which started in August last year, given all the information it was believed to have contained. The whole drama broke out when Jodie Fisher, who at the time worked as a marketing contractor for HP, accused Hurd of exploiting his position as the company’s CEO and sexually harassing her. She later dropped her claims after a cash settlement, but the incident has already swelled to become a much bigger mess.

Allred’s letter contained details about meetings between Hurd and Fisher over a period of several months, in addition to at least one other claim that set off alarm bells at the time. It even got the SEC ‘s attention, as we reported in December just over a year ago.

The letter also contains a potentially explosive allegation, which this newspaper has previously reported, that Hurd told Fisher in advance about then-secret negotiations for HP to buy tech services company EDS in a $13.9 billion deal. The allegation prompted a review by federal regulators, although no evidence surfaced publicly to indicate anyone used or profited from the advance information.

Statements from Fisher and later by a spokesman for Hurd cited inaccuracies in the document, though without specifying which.

The whole saga, which also involved a misuse of company funds by Hurd stacked up with an already shaky relationship with HP’s board of directors, eventually led to his replacement by Leo Apotheker. It went farther than that when shareholders expressed concerns about his multi-million severance; concerns that were finally answered this month.