In case you’re wondering, Ms. Holmes speaks in a soft, slightly low, but totally unremarkable voice, no hint of the throaty contralto she used while running her defunct blood-testing start-up Theranos.
“I made so many mistakes and there was so much I didn’t know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it’s like you really internalize it in a deep way,” Ms. Holmes said as we stopped to look at a hissing anaconda.
“How would you spend your time if you didn’t know how much time you had left?” Ms. Holmes said, her impending prison report date top of mind, perhaps even more so given that we were surrounded by animals behind bars. “It would be the kind of things we’re doing now because they’re perfect. Just being together.”
Ms. Holmes has not spoken to the media since 2016, when her legal team advised she go quiet. And, as the adage goes, if you don’t feed the press, we feed on you. In Elizabeth Holmes, we found an all-you-can-eat buffet. It had everything: The black turtlenecks, the Kabuki red lipstick, the green juices, the dancing to Lil Wayne. Somewhere along the way, Ms. Holmes says that the person (whoever that is) got lost. At one point, I tell her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She replied, almost reflectively, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”
So, why did she create that public persona? “I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn’t have good technical ideas,” said Ms. Holmes, who founded Theranos at 19. “Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn’t.”
Maybe?
Ten years ago, Ms. Holmes was the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, worth $4.5 billion (on paper, in Theranos stock), and one of the most visible and celebrated female C.E.O.s on the planet, running a start-up with a $9 billion valuation. Then, in 2015, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation into Theranos, calling into question whether its labs and technology — a sleek, boxy device called the Edison — actually worked as promised, testing for a wide range of illnesses with a tiny amount of blood collected with a rapid finger prick.
In 2016, federal inspectors from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found “deficient practices” in a Theranos lab that posed “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.”
That began a saga that would eventually lead to Ms. Holmes being convicted of criminal fraud charges.
The 15-week trial began in 2021 and featured extensive testimony about troubling practices at Theranos. The jury heard from several patients, including one who said a Theranos blood test revealed she was having a miscarriage when, in fact, she had a healthy pregnancy. Ms. Holmes was not convicted on any counts related to patients. But the testimony was a stark reminder of the human stakes of choosing biotech as your start-up.
Ms. Holmes was found guilty in January 2022 on four of 11 charges that she defrauded Theranos investors out of more than $100 million. Her top lieutenant at Theranos, and much older boyfriend at the time, Ramesh Balwani, was found guilty of 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud at Theranos. He began a 13-year prison sentence last month. On Thursday, his legal team filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit.
During the closely followed proceedings, a prosecutor, Robert Leach, said this was a case “about fraud, about lying and cheating,” alleging that Theranos raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors by misleading them about its blood-testing technology’s capabilities.
Lance Wade, a lawyer for Ms. Holmes, said that his client “made mistakes, but mistakes are not crimes.”
By the time I met Ms. Holmes and Mr. Evans, they 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. (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 date by an undetermined amount of time.)
Day 44: the afternoon we ordered in Mexican food at their quaint rental home near the Pacific.
Day 43: the morning we went for breakfast and Ms. Holmes breastfed her baby, Invicta (Latin for “invincible”) and sang along to Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants” on the loudspeakers (“This is the first album I ever owned.”).
Day 42: the time we had croissants and berries and Mr. Evans made coffee and we walked the couple’s 150-pound Great Dane-mastiff mix, Teddy, on the beach.
On the second day we spent together, Mr. Evans asked me what the most surprising part of spending so much time with Ms. Holmes was. I told him it’s that I didn’t expect her to be so … normal?
If you didn’t know she was that Elizabeth, whose trajectory launched a cottage industry of podcasts, TV shows, Halloween costumes and groupies who sold blonde wigs outside her trial, then you might sit next to her at the Lucha Libre taco shop in Mission Hills without thinking twice.
This is when Billy puts on the deep voice. The guttural one that the world heard in Ms. Holmes’s TED Talk and CNBC appearances and in the actress Amanda Seyfried’s Emmy-award-winning turn as Ms. Holmes in Hulu’s “The Dropout.”
If you hate Elizabeth Holmes, you probably think her feigned perma-hoarseness was part of an elaborate scheme to defraud investors. If you are a person who is sympathetic to Ms. Holmes, then the James Earl Jones inflection was a sign of the impossible gymnastics that female founders must perform to be taken seriously. If you spend time with Ms. Holmes, as I did, then you might come away like me, and think that, as with many things about Elizabeth Holmes, it was both. Either way, even Mr. Evans agrees, the voice was real weird.
He was driving the family’s Tesla. Ms. Holmes climbed in, after strapping the babies, calm and happy, into their carseats. I rode shotgun. “That would be crazy, if she answered the door and said, ‘Hi. I’m Elizabeth Holmes,” Mr. Evans said, imitating the voice. Ms. Holmes let out the slightest of giggles from the back seat.
by Amy Chozick, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Philip Cheung for The New York Times
