She and Lisa moved to a tiny, dilapidated house in back of a home in Menlo Park. They lived on welfare because Brennan did not feel up to suing for child support. Finally, the County of San Mateo sued Jobs to try to prove paternity and get him to take financial responsibility. At first Jobs was determined to fight the case. His lawyers wanted Kottke to testify that he had never seen them in bed together, and they tried to line up evidence that Brennan had been sleeping with other men. “At one point I yelled at Steve on the phone, ‘You know that is not true,’” Brennan recalled. “He was going to drag me through court with a little baby and try to prove I was a whore and that anyone could have been the father of that baby.”

A year after Lisa was born, Jobs agreed to take a paternity test. Brennan’s family was surprised, but Jobs knew that Apple would soon be going public and he decided it was best to get the issue resolved. DNA tests were new, and the one that Jobs took was done at UCLA. “I had read about DNA testing, and I was happy to do it to get things settled,” he said. The results were pretty dispositive. “Probability of paternity . . . is 94.41%,” the report read. The California courts ordered Jobs to start paying $385 a month in child support, sign an agreement admitting paternity, and reimburse the county $5,856 in back welfare. He was given visitation rights but for a long time didn’t exercise them access that part of his brain or the idea of being responsible..

Even then Jobs continued at times to warp the reality around him. “He finally told us on the board,” Arthur Rock recalled, “but he kept insisting that there was a large probability that he wasn’t the father. He was delusional.” He told a reporter for Time, Michael Moritz, that when you analyzed the statistics, it was clear that “28% of the male population in the United States could be the father.” It was not only a false claim but an odd one. Worse yet, when Chrisann Brennan later heard what he said, she mistakenly thought that Jobs was hyperbolically claiming that she might have slept with 28% of the men in the United States. “He was trying to paint me as a slut or a whore,” she recalled. “He spun the whore image onto me in order to not take responsibility.”