NY Times: Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes suddenly seems really nice and down to Earth.

A reporter fell for it. We won't.

"When a felon's not engaged in his employment—Or maturing his felonious little plans, His capacity for innocent enjoyment—Is just as great as any honest man's.

When the enterprising burglar's not a-burglin’—When the cut-throat isn't occupied in crime, He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling—And listen to the merry village chime."

—W.S. Gilbert, 1879.

Yesterday, the New York Times published a lengthy article about disgraced former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes.

In case you’ve forgotten, Holmes was the founder of a startup called Theranos. She claimed that her company's technology could revolutionize the blood testing industry by performing hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood. It was all fake. Holmes was convicted of fraud and conspiracy. She’s going to prison. But not yet. First she has to drink some antioxidant smoothies and talk to a wide-eyed Times reporter.

Now, if you want the entire tale, I can’t recommend John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood highly enough. Carreyrou broke this story in his dogged reporting for the Wall Street Journal and his telling of it is nothing short of gripping. I can’t remember reading a book more quickly.

The Times piece, by contrast, is among the most credulous drivel I’ve had the misfortune of slogging through. I did, so you don’t have to.

I’m going to just do a point-by-point commentary on some of the lowlights. I’ll keep all of this free, but if you find it useful, please the subscribe or upgrade:

So if you don’t feel like joining me as I (mostly) mercilessly dunk on Holmes, the unrepentant brown-nosers in her orbit, and the apparently hapless Times reporter Amy Chozick (who I’m sure has done other good work, but this ain’t it), let me summarize my feelings:

1. Gilbert & Sullivan had it right. See the quotation at the top of this article. (It’s from Pirates of Penzance).

2. I couldn’t care any less if Elizabeth Holmes kissed her parents every morning before school, made way for effin’ ducklings, and didn’t routinely microwave any of her pets. She’s a convicted criminal who ruined lives and made a mockery of the genuine innovation that the biotech industry has the potential to provide us. She warrants no special consideration.

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Elizabeth Holmes (on television portrayals of her): “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”

Translation: I lied and got caught.

Amy Chozick to Holmes’s life partner: “I told him…I didn’t expect her to be so … normal?”

This is the crux of it. Chozick either does not have (or did not learn) from experience dealing with convicts. People who do terrible things basically look like the rest of us most of the time.

Chozick: “I realized that I was essentially writing a story about two different people.”

No you weren’t. This is the whole “banality of evil” thing you may have read about (albeit, in more gruesome contexts). Bad people don’t wake up, kill a kitten, throw hot coffee at homeless people, and show up to work, do some evil, take a lunch meeting, do more evil, come home, filet the neighbor’s gerbil and enjoy it as an amuse-bouche prior to eating raw veal, before cozying up for some shut-eye and doing all over again. They give money to charity. They shroud themselves in good deeds. And when something does not go their way, it is then that they lie and cheat and steal and intimidate and pull every lever—even if that means harming other people’s lives—so that they can get their way.

The above quotation is the opening gambit to an entire set piece about how there are really two people here: There’s Elizabeth Holmes and there is Liz Holmes. One is good. One is bad. Now, if you can’t keep straight which is which, that’s because neither can they! The whole conceit is so tenuously constructed that Holmes, her crew, and Chozick literally can’t seem to keep the ruse consistent. (More on this as it comes.)

Chozick: “So, how could I be sure that ‘Liz’ wasn’t another character that Ms. Holmes had created?”

Easy. You don’t have to. Because it is irrelevant. Elizabeth and Liz are the same person. Convincing you otherwise to gain your favor, though, appears to have worked.

Chozick: "How do I believe you when you’ve been convicted of (basically) lying? But how could I ask someone who was nursing her 11-day-old baby on a white sofa two feet away if she was actually conning me?"

Another softball; How about acknowledge that being a nursing mother has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Chozick (on Holmes’s phony image, which included affecting a fake low voice, and always wearing the same style of black turtleneck): “[E]ven Mr. Evans agrees, the voice was real weird….Ms. Holmes let out the slightest of giggles from the back seat.”

Sure, let’s all agree to just laugh about all of this and make light of everything “Oh, ha-ha, what a fun game of pretend we all played!” Meanwhile, the former chief scientist at Theranos, Ian Gibbons, died by suicide—and to hear Gibbons’s widow tell it, that was a fairly direct downstream effect of the power that Holmes consolidated, power that was derived from this now supposedly folksy “character” we are meant to believe Holmes created.

Chozick: “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.”

I’m sorry but the good deeds of someone on a PR rehabilitation campaign aimed at limiting the consequences of a multi-year felonious hoax just don’t count.

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Now, the next part is not funny in the slightest. (Not that any of this really is, but I am admittedly being flippant in this essay, because the Times piece is just so incompetent and hapless that satire is the only practical way through it.) The Times piece attempts to connect decisions Holmes later made to having been raped while she was in college. Assuming Holmes’s account is accurate (and on this one thing, I’ll suspend my disbelief and believe her without reservation or qualification), my basic response is as follows: the perpetrator should have been arrested, tried, convicted, and sent to prison. Exactly how this relates to Holmes later lying extensively about a biotechnology that did not exist and defrauding droves of people is what I’m having a little trouble with.

Back to the snark to which the rest of this is owed….

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Enter Sunny Balwani. Sunny is Holmes’s ex-business and romantic partner. Sunny can’t comment because he’s already in prison. There’s some discussion about their toxic relationship. Holmes blames Balwani for the phony persona (i.e., the fake low voice, the black turtleneck, the not talking to your family; You know, typical twenty-something stuff.)

"He [Sunny Balwani] always told me I needed to ‘kill Elizabeth,’ so I could become a good entrepreneur,” she said."

Full stop. They can't even keep which of Holmes’s personality is which straight. See, I thought “Liz” is what her family/“real” friends called her. Remember? From just a few paragraphs ago?! If “Liz” was what her family and real friends called her" then it would be she (“Liz”) who Sunny was always telling her to kill, not “Elizabeth.” The story appears so half-baked (or recently concocted) that the players haven't yet consistently sorted out which personality is supposed to be Liz and which one is Elizabeth.

Later on, we get “‘Liz is not a natural born leader; she is more of a zealot than a showman,’ her partner/father of her two young children writes [to the judge sentencing her].”

Further in hear from a former college classmate: “There was “black turtleneck Elizabeth” and there was “real Elizabeth.”  Wait, so they were both Elizabeth? No Liz, eh?

I’m starting to suspect that “Liz” is a much “newer” Holmes concoction—recently thrown together for a PR campaign. Is this some real-life attempt at the plot device used on the 1990’s ABC television program Family Matters? (Perennial nerd Steve Urkel underwent a transformation so that he was no longer geeky, goofy Steve, but rather the suave and slick Stefan Urquelle in his stead). That’s just not how it works. You don’t get to change your name, voice, and clothes and be free of your past.

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Next, we move into the tearing down of Elizabeth Holmes phase. The basic idea here is that Holmes has received punishments that exceed her crimes. I’m not convinced. But her family and friends are.

Ms. Holmes’s father: “Everybody got on the train that Elizabeth was evil, and it was great copy, and they took it and ran with it.”

I’ll cop to schadenfreude on this one. Because, yes, Holmes did the things she’s been accused and convicted of doing. Indeed, it’s fodder for great copy. That is for two reasons. First, John Carreyrou is a great writer (again, just buy his book). Second, it is satisfying to watch a criminal crashing when they ruined the lives of others during their felonious ascent.

Chozick describes the view of Holmes’s defenders: “Ms. Holmes’s downfall felt like a witch trial, less rooted in what actually happened at Theranos, and more of a message to ambitious women everywhere. Don’t girl boss too close to the sun, or this could happen to you…” and “‘There’s an unspoken lesson for female executives: you’re allowed to be successful but not too successful,’ Jackie Lamping, a Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sister of Ms. Holmes at Stanford, wrote in a letter to Judge Davila, who oversaw the trial.’”

I reject this argument. Let’s think of other famous women CEOs. Unlike Holmes, Oprah Winfrey got rich fair and square. (Even the fact that we have her to blame for Dr. Oz’s celebrity status does not negate her genuine success in business and entertainment.) Martha Stewart got rich fair and square. Of Winfrey and Stewart, the one who did prison time (Stewart, for insider trading, you may recall) is the one who broke the law. It’s really that simple.

Folks, Elizabeth Holmes committed fraud. And it was not some “Oopsie, I did a little bad thing after doing a lot of good.” It was an elaborate, sustained hoax that she and her team went to great extremes to conceal (including some apparently appalling behavior by her lawyer David Boeis, as reported in Carreyrou’s book) so that nobody would discover that there was virtually never any there there.

If the implication is that male CEOs in Silicon Valley are just as crooked and deserve to have the book be thrown at them, then by all means, haul their sorry asses into court too. Nobody shed a single tear when Martin Shkreli went to prison. In fact, I seem to recall general merriment.

The only thing Holmes seems to regret is how she handled some of the attention she received. In Chozick, Holmes has a sympathetic audience: “In other words, she thinks if she’d spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company, she would have revolutionized health care by now.”

Ok, so Chozick still does not get that Holmes did not in fact ever figure out a realistic way to do a lot of important medical tests on a small amount of blood. Not getting that Holmes’s enterprise was b.s. from the start would seem to preclude the ability to write an appropriate piece about the perp. This explains a lot.

Worse, Chozick is played for an emotional sucker: “I can’t shake an earlier story that Mr. Evans [Holmes’s partner] relayed. In the waning days of Theranos, Ms. Holmes got a dog, a Siberian husky named Balto. Last year, when a mountain lion carried Balto away from the front porch, Ms. Holmes spent 16 hours searching in the woods, digging through brambles and poison oak, hoping to find him alive. Everyone knew Balto was dead, but Ms. Holmes kept searching. The relentlessness. The certainty. The fanaticism. It’s the same way Ms. Holmes kept hanging on at Theranos.”

This story may be true, but it’s also pretty close to a classic scene in Adam Sandler’s 1995 hit comedy “Billy Madison.”

“Ms. Holmes eventually found her beloved husky, Balto, in the woods. But by then the dog was gone, torn apart by the mountain lion.”

Maybe I’m being too cynical here, but I’d like to see DNA evidence that the carcass belonged to Balto—and preferably from a lab other than Theranos. And look, I’m aware that I am on a tirade here. But a story about her dead dog just has no earthly relevance to anything that truly matters here, other than as an insight into how Holmes bamboozled some reporter into finding her sympathetic.

“Over antioxidant smoothies, Ms. 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.”

Yeah, no thanks. We’re good. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.

Chozick hedges: “It’s this steadfast (or unhinged?) belief that has kept Ms. Holmes fighting, even though a guilty plea would have likely helped her chances of remaining free. [Per Holmes’s father], “She could have said, ‘Yes, I lied, and I tried my best to save mankind, but this happened in my enthusiasm.’…But she has taken the position that she is not guilty and that takes guts.’”

There’s no remorse, is there? Not from Holmes and not from her family. Nobody is sorry. Nobody is even sorry she got caught—the bare minimum!

Chozick: “Ms. Holmes and I sat at the kitchen table alone, talking. She didn’t seem like a hero or a villain. She seemed, like most people, somewhere in between.”

Where’s this nuance when newspapers report on convicts who committed crimes that in large part stem from having grown up in actual poverty?

Chozick: "I appreciated their hospitality, but I didn’t fully understand it. Usually interview subjects can’t wait to get rid of me."

It’s pretty easy to understand, actually. They're professionals and they know an easy mark when they see one.

Chozick: “As Ms. Holmes broke down thinking about what her children will be like in 11 years, I kept going back to her central promise at Theranos: The technology that she invented would, in her words, create “a world in which no one ever has to say goodbye too soon.” And there she was, preparing to do just that.”

Holmes’s children are genuinely innocent. I truly feel sorry for them. The sad fact is that Holmes’s actions will have done more to harm the two of them than just about anyone else in this sordid tale.

Everyone perhaps except Ian Gibbons.