The new Steve Jobs biopic is a travesty, says his ex. Cold? Ruthless? Obsessive? No, he was FAR worse than that. He denied he was the father of our child and was...ROTTEN TO THE CORE

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Fans of the iPhone and the iPad have long seen the late Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, as a messianic figure, whose drive and vision turned computers from clunky business machines into the epitome of cool. 

Danny Boyle's new biopic, starring Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet, will further burnish his remarkable reputation when it premiers next month.

But one woman has a different and more traumatic view: Jobs's high school sweetheart Chrisann Brennan. 

She lived with Jobs and was an early Apple employee, only for the relationship to fall apart amid wild recriminations when she became pregnant with his first child. 

According to Brennan, played in the film by Katherine Waterstone, Jobs – who died in 2011 – became a threatening monster in real life.

He denied he was the father, despite a positive paternity test. He paid a pittance in child support, while living the life of a millionaire. And one of the towering figures of the age even stooped to spreading lies that she had been unfaithful...

Flawed genius: Steve Jobs with his daughter Lisa at their home in Palo Alto, in California 

GLOSS: Michael Fassbender as Jobs and Makenzie Moss as Lisa in the movie

The high school grounds must have felt like a home away from home to Steve and me; that's the only reason I can think of to explain our decision to take LSD on the campus. We must have been naive to believe it was a good idea, but to our credit, the grounds were large and blessedly deserted on a Saturday.

I have a slight memory of pulling two wrapped hits out of my pocket, thinking that we might split one. But we each swallowed one whole. And then we waited – this was Steve's first time and he seemed frightened.

Out of the blue, he started to tell me that I would need to tell him 'not to put on airs' should he 'act out'. He wanted me to practice so I would be prepared to handle 'it'.

Prepared for what? I had no idea. Then the LSD took effect.

A lifetime later, I visited Steve after he was married. Our daughter Lisa was about 13 and Steve's son, Reed, a tiny baby. We were outside his house in Palo Alto, California, when, without warning, Steve blurted out the meanest, terrible comments at me, about why I was such a total failure of a human being. I gasped, but Steve's wife, Laurene, yelled at him to stop.

Then I thought back to Steve's first day on LSD – was it this he was scared of? He must have known he was capable of this Tourette's-like behaviour. It breaks my heart now to grasp how much he understood and tried to keep hidden back then.

Our relationship had continued through his college and we were living together in a shared house with Daniel Kottke, a computer engineer and one of the earliest staff members at Apple. It was a ranch-style place on Presidio Drive, close to Apple's first offices in Cupertino, California.

Steve wanted his buddy Daniel there because he believed it would break up the intensity of what wasn't working between us. Our relationship was running hot and cold. As Apple grew, so did Steve's sense of self-entitlement. His behaviour changed from adolescent and dopey to plain vicious.

Whenever we went out to eat, Steve would run down the waiters like a demon, detailing the finer points of good service, which included the notion that 'they should be seen only when he needed them'. Steve had become uncontrollably critical.

There are many men who in a backward kind of logic seem to care only for what they pay for and invest in, says his high school sweetheart Chrisann Brennan

In early October 1977, I realised I could endure our hot and cold relationship no longer. Steve and I had been dating since our schooldays. We were completely crazy about each other and utterly bored in turns. I had suggested to Steve that we separate, but he told me that he couldn't bring himself to say goodbye.

Steve and I still shared nights of lovemaking so profound that, astonishingly, some 15 years later, he called me out of the blue to thank me for them. He was married at the time of his call and all I could think of was: 'Whoa, men are really different.'

He was right: Our lovemaking had been sublime, but living with Steve in Cupertino was not as I had expected it to be. We shared nice dinners and some beautiful evenings, but we could barely sustain a sense of emotional intimacy, much less build on it.

It was like a game of Snakes And Ladders, with Steve as the game master who played to win at any cost. The ups were hopeful and the downs were extreme – then I found out I was pregnant.

It took me a few days before I told Steve. His face turned ugly. He gave me a fiery look, then rushed out without a word. I know it's widely believed that Steve asked me to have an abortion. And Steve, himself, has apparently been quoted as saying so. He even actively led people to believe that I slept around. But none of this was true. It served Steve's purposes to appear as the victim of a crazy woman to whom he'd had a slight attraction, but had never loved.

More than anything, I wanted Steve to just talk to me so we could make a decision together. Instead, he blamed me as if it were mine alone. At one point, well into the pregnancy, he told me he felt like I was stealing his genes.Apple was taking off and he had begun to think of himself as a high-end commodity. I didn't dare imagine Steve wanted to marry me. By all his actions, it was clear he had started considering me an embarrassing inconvenience.

Steve was fully aware of the big picture, but I had no way of knowing that Apple would go public within three years and that my pregnancy would have been perceived as a threat to Steve's public image and, therefore, the Apple brand.

I think they had it pretty much figured out by then that Steve was a wild card and a public relations nightmare. But spin it just right and you could romanticise him as the upstanding, if quirky, genius. So they created a persona for the gifted, good-looking young man. It was all branding and power. It was about money.

He became ever more unpleasant. 'If you give up this baby for adoption, you will be sorry,' he said. 'And I am never going to help you.' I soon quit the little job I had at Apple and went on welfare and started cleaning houses to make a little more money under the table.

For all the sparkling, spacious beauty of the Apple Stores, Steve was a haunted house whose brokenness was managed and orchestrated by Apple's PR team in an extremely masterful way

I asked Steve for money a couple of times, so I could rent a place, and he tilted his head in a kind of little boy way so that I would feel for him and said: 'You know I don't even get around to getting Apple to pay me back for my out-of-pocket expenses.'

And at this he pulled his wallet out to show me the blur of his receipts for the month. This was the extent of his answer. He wouldn't even take responsibility for saying no. I am sure that he was advised that if there was a legal case, it would not look good for him to have given me money.

That's probably why he started to seed people with the notion that I slept around and he was infertile, which meant that this could not be his child. People believed him, I think, because people wanted a hero. Apple was succeeding and Steve was brilliant. No one cared about a single mother.

After Lisa was born, Steve didn't call. I was utterly bereft. Outraged, too. It was only the intervention of an old friend who nailed him for his despicable behaviour three days later that changed his mind.

He came into the bedroom where I was sitting holding the baby. He sat next to me on the Japanese bed with our backs leaning up against the wall and I started crying. 'I just don't know what I'm going to...' I couldn't even finish my sentence before Steve cut me off. 'You're clean and dry, so you're fine!' he said sharply. Then he walked out.

This extremely odd response startled me. Later, I would understand that birth patterns replay over generations. Steve had been adopted at birth and perhaps the Jobses had said this to Steve.

Before he left, we went into a field to decide on a name. We agreed on Lisa. Why Steve wanted to use our newborn's name for his new company's new computer, the Apple Lisa, while denying paternity, dishonouring and abandoning both of us, was a question I couldn't answer.

Steve claimed at the time that it meant 'Local Integrated Software Architecture'. But we both knew the truth.

Sharing a daughter with him has forced me to think about things more deeply. Steve the saint, the alien, the despot, the punishing masculine god, the liar, the obsessed narcissist, the cult hero, the ID of the iEverything, the genius and the motherless boy

My welfare payments were $384 a month and the rent was $225, so a shabby little rental was all we could afford. I didn't feel safe and didn't have a phone or a car. Meanwhile, Steve's attorneys were trying to make a plausible case that I could have had men coming through the window and that someone else could have been Lisa's father. I was so jangled I couldn't think straight.

I didn't know why he was suddenly trying to be more damaging when I was minding my own business, trying to do the best for our daughter. Again, this was all about Apple going public. The attorneys must have figured out that the best way to protect their boy's image would be to make me – and Lisa – look like illegitimate heirs. During one of a number of terrible phone calls between us, I yelled at him: 'You know that I did not sleep around! And you know this is your child!' To my surprise, a deep well of silence seemed to pool on the other end of the line. I never heard another word about it.

Not long after, DNA testing was introduced. This was the game changer. I had from the beginning claimed that Steve was my daughter's father on the welfare forms, so welfare went after him to take the test – the State was bigger than Apple at that time. The DNA tests established paternity and directed Steve to pay $385 a month child support (which he rounded up to $500), as well as return to the state all back payments I had received from welfare. Apple went public a month later. Steve was worth millions.

In 1980, after Steve started sending a monthly automatic transfer to my account, he came over to my house out of the blue to speak to Lisa, who was not yet three.

He sat on the floor with us and then proudly announced to Lisa: 'I am your father.' It was like some kind of Darth Vader moment.

Then he waited for a response with a big, slightly fake smile on his face. I knew he was trying to do the right thing, but Lisa had no idea what he was saying. He literally said: 'I am one of the most important persons of your life.'

I looked at Lisa and then Steve and then Lisa again. Suddenly, I understood that the person I was longing to save the situation didn't have the basics of emotional intelligence, much less a real conscience. He was somehow just blank and theoretical.

I felt unspeakably heartbroken as Lisa, mute and shy, took him in with her soft eyes. She had no idea who this Mr Glad Rags was. Eventually, after not getting the applause he had somehow expected, he asked if we could go outside. Steve never came by again.

There are many men who in a backward kind of logic seem to care only for what they pay for and invest in. As Steve had so little invested, he did not know to care.

Fast-forward six years when Lisa was nine, after she and her father had grown to know and love each other. By this time, Steve was taking a break from Apple and had become humbled and more like his former self. It was then that Steve and Lisa decided to get her birth certificate straightened out. At nine, Lisa went from Lisa Brennan to Lisa Brennan- Jobs. Steve told me he could hardly believe that she wanted to take his name. Very plainly relieved and honest, he said: 'I am just so happy that she does.' I was touched by his surprise and glad for both of them.

I've truly hated Steve at times, but never for very long. Sharing a daughter with him has forced me to think about things more deeply. Steve the saint, the alien, the despot, the punishing masculine god, the liar, the obsessed narcissist, the cult hero, the ID of the iEverything, the genius and the motherless boy.

It is only because of Lisa that I have felt obligated to comprehend the many broken shards of Steve's glittering brilliance.

For all the sparkling, spacious beauty of the Apple Stores, Steve was a haunted house whose brokenness was managed and orchestrated by Apple's PR team in an extremely masterful way.

He told me once that he would lose his humanity in the business world. Though he came to lose sight of what was human and ethical all too often, the fact that he at one time knew the difference between who he was and the role he would play deepens my appreciation and love for him.

© Chrisann Brennan, 2015. The Bite In The Apple: A Memoir Of My Life With Steve Jobs is published by St Martin's Griffin and available from amazon.co.uk.