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A week ago, Amy Pascal “stepped down” as co-chairman of Sony Pictures. That’s the gentle way of saying it. What really happened was that she was fired, although Sony Corporate handled the Pascal exit pretty well. They left her out there for a few months to soak up the blame, then they negotiated a generous exit package for her semi-retirement. Her exit package includes her own production company associated with Sony, plus $30-40 million over the next four years. And for that kind of golden parachute, Pascal has nothing but nice things to say about her time at Sony. Pascal attended the Women in the World conference this week in San Francisco and she chatted about being “fired,” her relationship with Angelina Jolie and more. Some highlights:

She didn’t step down, she was fired: “All the women here are doing incredible things in this world — all I did was get fired.”

Realizing her emails had been hacked: “I ran this company, and I had to worry about everybody who was really scared … People were really scared … But nagging in the back of my mind, I kept calling [IT] and being like, ‘They don’t have our emails, tell me they don’t have our emails,’ ” she said. “But then they did. That was a bad moment. And you know what you write in emails.”

The Angelina Jolie emails: “The first person I talked to was Angie after that email… Angie didn’t care. Everybody understood because we all live in this weird thing called Hollywood. If we all actually were nice, it wouldn’t work.”

All of the offensive stuff that came out in the emails: “As a woman, I figured that what I did was control how everybody felt about themselves and about me, that’s how I did my job. That’s kind of the way that a lot of us act as leaders and there was this horrible moment when I realized there was absolutely nothing at all that I could do about whether I’d hurt people, whether I’d betrayed people, whether I’d said things that I didn’t mean. I couldn’t protect anyone — not their feelings, not what they thought of me. It was horrible because that’s how I figured I did my job for all of my life. It was also strangely freeing because all of a sudden, it was just what it was.”

On celebrities: “They’re bottomless pits of need. You’ve never seen anything like it. But they are so great. They’re this magical thing that no one else can be. It’s a duality of both things. They’re filled with need to be loved and to be great, but that’s because they’re magical.”

[From Us Weekly & THR]

I rolled my eyes at the last quote, about celebrities being bottomless pits of need AND magical creatures. What a half-assed attempt at a save. As for the Jolie stuff… I don’t believe Pascal. Let’s be clear: Pascal and Jolie did have a good working relationship and I’ll believe that they felt like they knew each other pretty well. So do you think Pascal’s first call would be to Jolie if Pascal thought Jolie was going to be totally cool and ambivalent about the whole thing? Right. And if Jolie was hurt or upset, who would blame her? What Scott Rudin said about Jolie was harsh, bratty and Mean Girl-y. And Pascal said nothing in Jolie’s defense. Why is the official line “Angie didn’t care”?

Photos courtesy of WENN, Getty.