'Unseemly Sideshow': Judge Halts Kleiner Perkins Focus on Pao's Finances

A judge shut down what could have been a major plot twist in a gender bias trial that has gripped Silicon Valley on Thursday. Judge Harold Kahn upheld an earlier ruling that bars Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' lawyers from arguing that former partner Ellen Pao brought a $16 million suit on the storied venture capital firm as a way to relieve her family's financial woes. The defense wanted to use tax liens and bankruptcy filings to show that Pao and her husband were having money trouble when Pao first filed her complaint in 2012. Kahn said in his ruling that the argument would have amounted to an "unseemly sideshow" and that the evidence would be an irrelevant invasion of privacy.