My father the very ROTTEN
Steve Jobs’s iPhone giant has become the world’s first $1trillion company. But in a blistering memoir, the daughter he rejected says he was as miserly with money as he was with his love
him as a driven genius who admitted that having been adopted as a child instilled a feeling of powerlessness that made him determined to bend others to his will. His teenage sweetheart Chrisann Brennan wasn’t spared — described by her daughter Lisa in the film as ‘troubled’, she has to admit to Jobs on screen that she spent $1,500 of his money having her house blessed.
Laurene and Apple executives also refused to co-operate with a 2015 documentary film, Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine. It was far more critical of him and was influenced by Miss Brennan’s own withering memoir, published two years earlier.
In it, she claimed she had been ‘an object of his cruelty’, which increased after Apple took off and, she claimed, he became too grand even to do the washing up.
She also described the moment she had told him she was pregnant with Lisa. ‘ Steve’s jaw clenched and there was this searing anger,’ she said. ‘He runs out the door kind of like a teenager, and slams it.’
He subsequently showed he was willing to ‘drag me through court with the little baby to prove I was a whore and that anyone could have been the father of that baby’.
Miss Brennan admits Jobs later apologised to her and Lisa for his behaviour.
He gradually increased his financial support, eventually giving them $4,000 a month, and bought her a $400,000 house and two cars.
However, Chrisann complained that getting it out of him was ‘like pulling teeth’, and that his generosity could be withdrawn instantly, such as when he stopped paying for Lisa to attend Harvard University after they had a row. Miss Brennan — now working as a painter — was struggling financially, as she had all her adult life, when she wrote to Jobs in 2005 and again in 2009. She said she would abandon writing a memoir in return for $25 million ‘net’ to her, and $5 million to their daughter Lisa in compensation for their suffering.
‘All the years that I have lost, as a sort of theft, from dishonourable behaviour can heal and be forgiven,’ she wrote. Their hardship, she added, was ‘ all the more confusing and difficult because you had so much money’.
Of her memoirs, she wrote: ‘No one is going to be impressed with either of us in this book, and it will hurt Lisa, who never deserved any of this. The choice is yours.’
Jobs wrote back after the 2009 letter saying: ‘I don’t react well to blackmail. I will have no part in any of this.’
Given that much of what Lisa knows about her father was filtered through her mother, it’s entirely possible that if Jobs had paid up, he might have been spared both Chrisann’s memoir and the forthcoming one from Lisa.
It’s also not unreasonable to conclude Chrisann’s resentment was sharpened by the very different fate of the woman who became Mrs Jobs.
JOBSmet Laurene Powell — eight years his junior — in 1989 when he gave a lecture at Stanford Business School in California, where the pretty blonde was a student.
In her memoir, Chrisann cited rumours that Laurene went out to snare Jobs. She said Jobs told her how Laurene ‘sat in the front row [of the lecture] and then waited for him until after everyone had left, leaning back on a chair and looking intently at him’. They had dinner together that night.
Jobs married Laurene a year and a half after they met and they had three children together — Reed, Erin and Eve.
An authorised 2011 biography of Jobs suggested he wasn’t exactly a great father to them either.
‘Jobs developed a strong relationship with Reed, but with his daughters he was more distant,’ it said. ‘ He would often completely ignore them when he had other things on his mind.’ All three offspring, now in their 20s, have kept a low profile although his daughter Eve is a successful international equestrian.
Like their mother, none of them has so far risked rocking the Apple boat by criticising their father. But, then, they have rather more to lose. Laurene, 54, was the main beneficiary in his will. She and her children are estimated to be worth $21.4 billion in Forbes magazine’s annual list.
She remains a reclusive figure,
A BRAZeN drug dealer has bragged about his life behind bars, posting videos on social media of inmates hiding weapons in their clothes.
Almis Maganga was jailed for six years in February after police found drugs worth more than £34,000 at his home.
however, the 21-year-old has since been documenting his cushy life behind bars on social media, gloating about using games consoles, drugs and a smuggled iPhone 7.
he also posts videos of himself wearing a dressing gown, smoking what appears to be drugs in his cell and shows off his chicken and rice dinners.
Maganga poses alongside fellow inmates, and shared one picture of the vista from his cell with the caption, ‘Penthouse view’.
Another video of other prisoners is captioned ‘F****** spice heads’, suggesting the drug spice is rife at the Category B men’s prison. Maganga, from hounslow, west London, also brags about the Xbox and computer games he has in his cell, as well as a sound system.
More than 7,000 phones were found in prisons across Britain in the past two years, a Freedom of Information request by Mail Online found.
The mobiles are used by prisoners to orchestrate revenge attacks, contact terrified victims and arrange drug deals.
Maganga, who is understood to be at Wormwood Scrubs in west London, regularly shares pictures and videos with his 1,401 Twitter followers.
he was arrested with another man and a woman as part of a police operation in which drugs worth £37,400 and more than £6,000 in cash were seized at an address in November. in hounslow, west London,
Police recovered drugs including heroin, crack and cocaine.
But far from turning his life around, Maganga brags about hiding a tiny ‘hMP phone’ from guards. The so-called ‘Beat the BOSS’ phones – designed to evade body scanners used by prison staff to find contraband devices and weapons – can be bought online for as little as £25 but change hands for up to £500 inside jails. A Prison Service spokesman said: ‘We won’t tolerate this behaviour and prisoners face an extra two years behind bars for using a social media account in prison. ‘We have closed over one thousand social media accounts since 2016 and invested £2 million to detect and block mobile phones to prevent them being set up in the first place.’ Last week, the Mail reported how inmates were getting friends on the outside to throw fillet steak, sausages and fresh fish over the walls because they didn’t like prison food.
A report by the Independent Monitoring Board into hMP Thorn Cross in Cheshire, which holds 380 inmates, said other items thrown over the perimeter into the prison grounds include salmon and bacon.
The IMB report added: ‘Contraband continues to be problematic. There have been incidences of mobile phones, sim cards, phone chargers... and even fresh meat and fish.’
The Mail has also told how that inmates at hMP Guys Marsh, near Shaftesbury, Dorset, were bragging about their ‘cushy’ life on Facebook, showing off cells crammed with games consoles and stereos using a smuggled phone.
Inmates feasting on steak and sausages hurled over jail walls From the Mail, August 9