INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO. 72: What did we learn from Elizabeth Holmes?

THE WORST THING WE READ™

Theranos Founder and C.E.O. Elizabeth Holmes. Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair.

A Tiny Drop of Skepticism

CONVICTED FRAUD ARTIST Elizabeth Holmes broke her six-year media silence in March to talk to the New York Times, or more precisely, to hang out with the Times reporter Amy Chozick for days on end, test-driving her new public persona before she goes away to prison. Holmes took Chozick along on a family trip to the San Diego Zoo, walked with her on the beach, breast-fed her baby in front of the reporter at breakfast "and sang along to Ace of Base's 'All That She Wants' on the loudspeakers." 

The premise of the resulting story, which ran at great length in the Sunday business section, was that Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, were "counting the days until April 27, when she had been required to report to Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, for 11.25 years." A parenthetical immediately followed: "(Shortly before she was due at prison, Ms. Holmes made a last-minute request to remain free pending an appeal, which automatically delayed her report day by an undetermined amount of time.)"

There were a lot of reversals in the piece. Elizabeth Holmes is a crook and a creep, who worked hard to push fake medical technology out where real people would try to use it, and who ruthlessly set out to punish the people who sought to stop her, as her company, Theranos, temporarily made her a billionaire. Amy Chozick wanted to make it clear that she knew that, and that she knew she was sitting down with a manipulative person for a transactional profile—access to Holmes in exchange for Holmes' access to the Times. 

So she presented the piece as her own struggle with two separate subjects: 

I realized that I was essentially writing a story about two different people. There was Elizabeth, celebrated in the media as a rock-star inventor whose brilliance dazzled illustrious rich men, and whose criminal trial captivated the world. Then there is 'Liz," (as Mr. Evans and her friends call her), the mom of two who, for the past year, has been volunteering for a rape crisis hotline. Who can't stomach R-rated movies and who rushed after me one afternoon with a paper towel to wipe a mix of sand and her dog's slobber off my shoe. 

Many readers objected to this premise. There is only one Elizabeth Holmes, and the rape-crisis volunteer is the same person who committed the fraud. Imagining them as two separate figures came across as deliberate gullibility, allowing Holmes to market the less appalling aspects of her life as an alternative to the more appalling facts of her record. 

Chozick tried to object to the premise, too, despite being the person who came up with it. Throughout the piece, moments of sympathy for Holmes were followed up with warnings. A friend of Holmes "said Ms. Holmes had genuine intentions at Theranos and didn't deserve a lengthy prison sentence," Chozick wrote. "Then, this person requested anonymity to caution me not to believe everything Ms. Holmes says." Chozick described Holmes' account of achieving nuclear family life as "a lot like the story of someone who had finally broken out of a cult and been deprogrammed," then turned around to note, "But then I remember that Ms. Holmes was running the cult." 

What was the point of all this back-and-forth? It was possible to read the piece—and it was pretty clearly, as a matter of technique, meant to be read this way—as an exercise in letting Elizabeth Holmes gradually indict herself. The reporter was playing the role of the con artist's newest victim, letting herself be "swept up in Liz as an authentic and sympathetic person," confessing she found her subject "charismatic" and "mesmerizing," even as she strewed those crumbs of skepticism and doubt along the way.

This was an explicit theme of the piece, never more so than when Chozick broke the fourth wall, and possibly a fifth wall, by dragging the story's editor into the story itself: