Let it be known that I love to see a girlboss winning. Women deserve to succeed and have their achievements celebrated, particularly in fields where they are underrepresented. However, this sentiment does not extend to those willing to cheat their way to the top, or who adopt a fake deep voice and cosplay as the next Steve Jobs. That’s right, I’m talking about you, Elizabeth Holmes.
Elizabeth Holmes is a Stanford drop-out who was able to con unknowing doctors, investors, and Henry Kissinger into believing her company Theranos’s defective blood testing device could run hundreds of tests with the prick of a finger. It, in fact, could do literally none of what she promised; regardless, Holmes was able to generate billions of dollars from private equity firms. Thanks to groundbreaking reporting from John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal (who wrote the phenomenal book Bad Blood after the fact) and the bravery of initial whistleblower Tyler Schultz, Holmes was exposed and Theranos went bankrupt.
Holmes now faces possible jail time for her actions. Her trial, which began in September, has illustrated an appalling composite of her wrongdoing. Various witnesses — ranging from former Theranos lab directors to a patient whose faulty Theranos blood test results led her to falsely believe that she had miscarried — have cast Holmes as an apathetic person intent on becoming Silicon Valley’s latest tech tyrant. To combat this disparaging portrayal of Holmes, the defense is claiming that she was unaware that her company was marketing products that did not work because she was simultaneously being abused and coerced by her business partner Sunny Balwani.
Balwani, whose trial is set for 2022, served as Theranos’s Chief Operating Officer and Holmes’s romantic partner. Testimony from former Theranos employees suggests that the two were despotic and cruel, pressuring their employees to fabricate data and then silencing them when they became disillusioned by the company. There’s truly nothing like a little white collar crime to spice up a relationship. Domestic abuse is not something to take lightly; however, anyone who knows anything about the Theranos scandal or Holmes in general, sees the defense’s abuse claim as a blatant attempt to elicit sympathy from the jury. There is written proof, in the form of hundreds of texts shown as evidence in court, that Holmes was an eager participant in the relationship. This ploy is an affront to real survivors of abuse, not to mention further proof of Holmes’s inability to claim any form of responsibility for her actions.
Scandals that rock the conscience of the rich and famous are always fun to follow, but Holmes doesn’t even make for that compelling of a villain. She was born into wealth, thanks to her father, who worked at Enron for some time (it seems misconduct runs in the family). She never completed her education at Stanford, instead dropping out to pursue a career as a full-time swindler. When her company was exposed for being a fraud, she hid behind daddy’s money and a new acquisition in the form of an heir to a hotel chain, Billy Evans. While her former employees and victims were off licking their wounds, Holmes was off partying it up at Burning Man. Now she shows up to the trial with her baby, perhaps hoping to appear to the majority-male jury as a MILF in training. You cannot make this up.
If Theranos was a poorly-written Netflix drama, then Holmes is the underdeveloped antagonist with a bad haircut and a sour attitude. I hope she is found guilty, and that this myth about the second coming of Steve Jobs can finally be put to rest.