“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,” Holmes said. Liz Holmes wants you to forget about Elizabeth:
Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans at home in Del Mar, Calif., on March 24, 2023.
“How would you spend your time if you didn’t know how much time you had left?” 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.”
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.By the time I met Holmes and 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.
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 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 Holmes, as I did, then you might come away like me, and think that, as with many things about Holmes, it was both.
This warning stuck with me, and it got at something that had been gnawing on me since I first met Holmes. How do you have an honest conversation with a person whose fraud trial has played out so publicly? I tried to ask Holmes this directly.
Which is why she was there in a San Jose federal courthouse using the high-tech Elvie breast pump with its glowing aqua nipples. “She looked like a fembot,” Evans said. She then put this work into context, telling me how surviving a rape at a fraternity party her sophomore year at Stanford had, in retrospect, colored so many of her life choices. It’s the part of her story that she keeps getting back to. The one she told a sympathetic, but ultimately undeterred jury, according to news reports. The one she wants people to listen to.
As Holmes explained it, echoing a key part of her defense strategy, Balwani kept close control over her every action. She detailed extensive domestic abuse and sexual assault. She said that Balwani forced her to stop speaking to her family and Stanford friends and pressured her to adopt the black-turtleneck, red-lipstick persona.Jeffrey Coopersmith, a lawyer for Balwani, denied the allegations. “Our client is not a person who is vindictive or mean spirited or aggressive,” he said.
Balwani’s lawyer, Coopersmith, said his client was in regular contact with Holmes about any issues at the lab, adding that she “was a strong woman who had a vision and Sunny was helping her execute her vision.” In 2016, as regulators scrutinized Theranos, Balwani resigned. Theranos shut down its clinical laboratory and laid off roughly 40% of its estimated 790 employees. Holmes’ brother , Christian Holmes V, helped her pack up and move out of the mansion she’d shared with Balwani. Holmes, barred from working in a medical laboratory for two years, checked into a hotel and then rented a two-bedroom home in Los Altos.
Holmes and Evans quickly became more than friends and moved in together. “It had been two years of all this stuff written about me, and I think you get to know someone in a totally different way when you walk in with that skepticism versus if you meet when everything is sunshine and roses,” Holmes said. “That allowed us to get to know each other in a really deep way.”
The next year, in 2019, after U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila set a date for Holmes’ criminal trial, she and Evans hit the road. As prosecutors assembled their case, Holmes and Evans spent six months traveling the country in an recreational vehicle, sleeping in campgrounds and Walmart parking lots. Holmes balanced outdoor yoga and long hikes in national parks with working on her legal defense.
An earlier legal team quit after Holmes could not pay them. One pre-sentencing report by the government put her legal fees at more than $30 million. Holmes did not detail how those fees would be paid, and her current representatives at Williams & Connolly did not respond to emails asking about her financial arrangement.
Holmes’ defenders, stretching back to childhood, said in letters to the court, and in conversations with me, that the feverish coverage of Holmes’ downfall felt like a witch trial, less rooted in what actually happened at Theranos, and more of a message to ambitious women everywhere.
Holmes chooses her words carefully when I ask if the prominent men who invested and joined the Theranos board were drawn to the startup partly because the founder was an attractive young woman. “A lot of people were attracted to this for their own reasons,” she said. Over antioxidant smoothies, Holmes told me she has ideas for COVID testing, drawing on her work in a Singapore lab as a college student during the SARS outbreak.
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