NEW YORK — The editor-in-chief of Rosie O'Donnell's celebrity magazine thought she'd be fired if she disagreed with the star about content in the now-defunct Rosie Magazine, she testified Friday in the high-stakes courtroom battle over the publication's downfall.

"I did feel that if I disagreed with Rosie too much it would jeopardize my job," said Cathy Cavender.

Cavender's testimony was part of parent company Gruner + Jahr's attempt to paint O'Donnell as a "foul-mouthed tyrant" who sought to sink the magazine when her efforts to make it less friendly — and more feisty — failed.

O'Donnell filed a counterclaim against the company, saying it violated their contract by shutting her off from editorial control of the magazine, disparaging her in the press, and cooking the books to prevent her from exercising an exit clause in her contract.

Gruner + Jahr is seeking $100 million; O'Donnell is seeking $125 million.

The testimony has turned a high-powered microscope on the minutiae of magazine publishing. Cavender further exposed the inner workings of the magazine, which was styled after O'Donnell's popular television show. O'Donnell quit the show May 22, 2002, on the heels of her announcement that she was gay.

According to Cavender, that's when O'Donnell began trying to rough up the magazine's image.

"She wanted to make the magazine edgier, more controversial, push the envelope more," said Cavender of a June 2002 e-mail O'Donnell had sent her. O'Donnell, said Cavender, explained that, with the show off the air, she had extra time on her hands to dedicate to the publication.

Cavender agreed with Gruner + Jahr lawyers that O'Donnell's unconventional editorial decisions were not good for business. A dour cover featuring the wheelchair-bound Christopher Reeve, for example, "would not do well at the newsstand."

But the editor, whose working relationship with the sometimes brash O'Donnell appeared to be functional, if a little one-sided, seemed to reserve judgment on whether O'Donnell's newfound editorial direction amounted to sabotage, or simply a change in her personal convictions.

E-mails and internal memos have featured largely in the publisher's two-day case so far, a trend that continued Friday. 

"It is not brave enough. It is not bold. It needs to not give a f**k," read a manifesto O'Donnell forwarded to Cavender and other editors in June 2002, two months before she left. "It needs to scream the truth as we, (or is it I) see it. That's why I got into the magazine business. Not for the money — I don't care about or need any more money ever."

Later in the memo, O'Donnell wrote that she would rather "go down in the surf ... than stay at the shore, watching the brave ones swim."

"Gruner + Jahr had been concerned about the magazine as it was," said Cavender. "There was concern outside the magazine that the magazine was already too edgy."

But, while the German company has seized on such "sink-or-swim" statements to suggest that O'Donnell sought to "torpedo" the money-losing magazine she had already poured $6 million into, O'Donnell also appeared optimistic about the fate of her publication.

"If we build this, they will come," she wrote later in the same June memo.

To counter O'Donnell's contrarian impulses, Gruner + Jahr brought in an editor less likely to cave to her demanding nature. But O'Donnell clashed with new editor Susan Toepfer from the start, and ultimately left the publication after an alleged bid to unseat her and reinstate Cavender failed.

Jane Farrell, an executive editor with "Rosie" still employed by Gruner + Jahr, had a window seat to the dying days of the magazine.

During a July 22 meeting, Farrell told the court, O'Donnell gathered senior editors at a meeting and "began a kind of rambling monologue ... she was very angry."

At one point, O'Donnell gestured toward the new editor, Toepfer. "Hey, editor-in-chief, come over here," Farrell recalled O'Donnell saying sarcastically.  "Come over here and sit with me, editor-in-chief."

O'Donnell ended the meeting, said Farrell, by telling those in attendance to call her lawyers if they had any questions.

Supreme Court Justice Ira Gammerman is presiding over this bench trial.