In a performance more riveting than anything else from Disney this year, the group's former second-in-command told a courtroom yesterday about his feelings of personal betrayal after being sacked by his long-time friend, Disney chief executive Michael Eisner.

"I was best friends with this guy and his family," Michael Ovitz told a court hearing a case brought by shareholders. "I loved this guy like a brother. We spent holidays together. I was at the funeral of one of his parents, he was at the birth of my first son. We were together Thanksgiving, Christmas. I was very close to his children. He was close to mine. My wife was his wife's best friend. There was very little that we didn't share with each other as a family. We lived together, basically."

The outburst had little to do with the case being heard by the court in Delaware. Shareholders have brought an action against Mr Eisner and Mr Ovitz in an attempt to recoup some of the $140m (£78m) severance pay awarded to Mr Ovitz when his 14-month tenure as company president was brought abruptly to an end.

Mr Ovitz took advantage of his second day on the witness stand to pour his heart out. "What to this day, and until the day I die, I will never be able to understand ... [is] how I spend 25 years with a man and his family and within 60 days of taking this position he decides that I'm a number of things that he had 25 years to figure out if I was or I wasn't.

"Now I'm not the smartest guy in the world," he continued, "and I'm not the dumbest guy in the world. And I'm a loyal friend, and I am a horrible enemy. But I was this guy's friend. I'm not sitting here trying to play victim because I don't play that role very well.

"But it all went downhill, and I don't understand how. And I never will understand how a guy that lived with me, and a guy and his wife who lived with my wife and I, could be with me so much and then [contend] that I'm a liar, that I have a veracity issue, that I'm a psychopath.

"I can't figure it out. I can't figure it out because I know he wanted to do good for the company ... I said, 'just train me and I'll cover your back'. I said, 'all you got to do is cover mine'. It never happened. I live to this day with a 25-year hole in my life and seven or eight of the worst years I've had in business, or personally, or anything else."

The case continues.