For more than a week now, Hewlett-Packard's Patricia Dunn has been pilloried on all fronts for her handling of the company's boardroom leaks. And now, as is often the way in these stories, another side is being told. Fortune's David Kirkpatrick says that Dunn's supporters paint a far different picture of what led to last week's meltdown. Much of the focus is on former director Thomas Perkins, who blew the whistle on the snooping of board members' phone records.

In effect, her supporters say, she was willing to resist Perkins even at the cost of a public spectacle. They say she underestimated how disastrous for the company that spectacle would become, because she really didn't know until just a few weeks ago that the company's investigators had crossed the line into unethical and probably illegal behavior in the search for leakers that led to the unmasking of [board member George] Keyworth.

Her supporters say that even if she knew about the pretexting, she absolutely didn't realize that the techniques had also been used on journalists and employees. She also felt that since the board knew about the leak investigation, board members had accepted and understood that they would be investigated themselves. Clearly Perkins disagrees. In a June 20 email to the company's outside counsel, Larry Sonsini, chairman of Wilson Sonsini, he wrote that the investigation was "unknown to the board except...in the most vague and imprecise terms."

Kirkpatrick also brings up an angle that has gotten very little attention: Patricia Dunn's health.

It seems that Dunn is very sick. As David Kaplan in Newsweek revealed in his story Monday, even after having had breast cancer in 2000 and melanoma in 2002, Dunn was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2004 and underwent extensive surgery last month after doctors discovered a malignant tumor in her liver.

Think about that timing. It would have quite possibly been late July or early August when Dunn was preparing to go into the hospital for major liver surgery. The letters between Sonsini and Perkins in which the latter demanded the board investigate the practice of "pretexting", or impersonating someone in order to get their phone records, were exchanged during July. It wasn't until July 28 that Perkins wrote his most concrete and accusative letter, which he addressed to the entire board (for the first time) and which included the following well-crafted and persuasive sentence: "That the illegal pretext was done by a consultant is no excuse or defense to HP, which authorized, induced, and benefited from the illegal fraud."

Keep an eye on these more sympathetic accounts - or hadn't you heard that Mike Sitrick was hired by Dunn and H-P last week to do crisis management work? Now I wouldn't have the first clue as to whether Sitrick got to Kirkpatrick. And the piece is not exactly complimentary. But it does offer a more nuanced view of what might have happened.