The Elizabeth Holmes Press Redemption Tour Was Inevitable

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | May 9, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | May 9, 2023 |

We knew it would happen. We all knew this was coming, right? It was so wearily inevitable that I’m surprised it took this long. Elizabeth Holmes, the criminal who is gearing up to serve an 11 ¼ year prison sentence for fraud, received a parodic glowing profile courtesy of the New York Times. The piece, complete with a contemplative image of a non-turtleneck-wearing Holmes, fawns over her new status as a mother of two. The journalist, Amy Chozick, even admits that she struggles to push against Holmes and her myriad instances of provable crimes while serving as CEO of Theranos because she’s so taken by the sight of her as a doting mum with a newborn. I’m not sure I’d recommend you use one of your free NYT clicks of the month on this piece, but it is a fascinating insight into the kinds of ‘journalism’ that bends over backwards to rehabilitate those who thoroughly do not deserve it.

Holmes was always a unique figure in the midst of the ‘scammers’ fad that polluted the discourse for a few years. While many low-level crooks and wannabe influencers were ironically reclaimed as #girlboss-types or accidental Robin Hoods, the Theranos founder never received such softness, except for moments of brief irony. There are ethical quandaries behind, say, making Anna Delvey a pseudo-folk hero, because her crimes were rather low-stakes and caused minimal collateral damage. Elizabeth Holmes f**ked around with people’s medical histories. She spent years creating a façade of scientific advancement while targeting vulnerable people as test subjects for phony blood testing machines that never worked. In a class action lawsuit from the people of Arizona, the court heard how a woman who took a Theranos test was told she was miscarrying, when she was still pregnant. One patient was given a false positive HIV test. Holmes arranged for medical studies that measured how late-stage cancer patients responded to Theranos-related treatment, even after she knew it to be fraudulent. Imagine being a cancer patient in remission who fears their disease has returned because a selfish billionaire decided to continue pushing broken tech and dangerous lies to ensure her investors didn’t abandon her. You can’t make someone like that into an anti-hero, not even at your most cynical.

But that, of course, doesn’t mean she was never going to receive some level of sympathetic press coverage. Holmes is but the latest participant in a long, tedious, and repetitive cycle of media whitewashing. We could be here all day listing her predecessors, from Vogue writing shockingly sappy propaganda of the Syrian President’s wife to Air Mail rolling out the red carpet of sad man pity for accused sex crime offender Armie Hammer. Whether your errors are big or small, there will always be a slew of editors, producers, and executives eager to offer you a safe route back to your previous status. That doesn’t even get into the publicist industrial complex ensuring said road is a smooth as possible for their well-paying clients. Hello, Johnny Depp’s entire team.

With Holmes, it’s all too easy to weaponize that image of the sad white lady with a baby in her arms who, by golly gosh, is so sorry for the oopsies she did. The Holmes with the Steve Jobs cosplay who palled around with Henry Kissinger and wanted to send fraudulent equipment into war zones: that’s the Elizabeth of the past! She’s Liz now! But she’s not. Even in the piece, the writer notes that Holmes ‘thinks if she spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company, she would have revolutionized health care right now.’ The journalist at least calls this ‘misguided talk’ but it’s still framed as part of a puff piece to downplay her fraud conviction. By the way, she wouldn’t have changed the world if she’d just stayed off the cover of Wired. What she wanted to do — to make thousands of kinds of blood tests viable from a mere pinprick — is scientifically impossible. Actual scientists noted this for years while the press boosted Theranos’ net worth through unverified reporting.

The attempted rehabilitation of Holmes is, in part, a way for the media to pretend they were never wrong. They weren’t failing basic journalistic standards by reporting Theranos press releases as gospel. They didn’t fail in their jobs when they ‘forgot’ to ask doctors and scientists if the technology they were never allowed to see could truly work. The only one who stood up against this nonsense was John Carreyrou, and by doing the simplest of follow-ups on an evidently fishy story, he brought the entire company crashing down. It didn’t take much: just one person doing what they were always supposed to do.

Editors make choices about what is written, what is published, what is prioritized by their on- and offline push. The New York Times didn’t decide to slide this Holmes piece under the door while nobody was looking. It was listed on the home page of their website, one of the most visited sites on the entire internet. It was picked up and click-baited into oblivion by countless other publications, as it was designed to be. A lot of this is done in the name of so-called balance, this bastardized interpretation of objectivity that has tainted modern media in potentially irrevocable ways. The move to give both sides of an issue equal weight and amplification inevitably empowers the liars. There’s this hopelessly naïve notion (or perhaps one of active callousness) that insists all topics can be the focus of fun debate, from who pays the bill on a date to who gets to be alive in a public space. While think-piece writers debate whether murdering a houseless person in broad daylight is morally okay, Elizabeth Holmes is treated like a minor quirk in the disaster she birthed. This isn’t a bug: it’s all by design. ‘Mistakes are not crimes,’ so says Amy Chozick in her piece. It’s true, they aren’t always, but in this case, they definitely were.

Elizabeth Holmes is off to prison soon. When she gets out, I’m sure she’ll be fine. She’ll probably earn a few more sappy profiles for her troubles. During her prison time, we’ll, unfortunately, see a whole lot more figures like Elizabeth Holmes. You’ll be able to find them from the blinding sheen on articles like this.