Bloody Pathetic: Part 1
“Bad Blood" is a cautionary tale about the importance of due diligence, so why wasn't it applied to John Carreyrou's book?
When “Bad Blood” was published in 2018, John Carreyrou became America’s favorite journalist. The book had a built-in audience eager to read the definitive story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. It was easy money for the book’s publishers. And for Carreyrou, it would earn him his second Pulitzer Prize.
One of the book’s central themes serves as a warning about what can happen when due diligence isn’t performed. It’s ironic how American readers and the Pulitzer committee made the same mistake as Theranos investors. “Bad Blood” readers felt they had all the answers and without question. It’s only when you give the book a closer read that you see how it’s a metaphor for what the Fourth Estate has become.
After I read “Bad Blood,” I sensed it was missing more than a few things. As a reading experience, it was average. It relies too much on hearsay instead of facts. Also, a journalist who includes themself in their story doesn’t appeal to me. It takes a special writer and unique circumstances to pull it off. Hunter S. Thompson’s “Hells Angels” would be one example. “Down and Out In Paris and London” by George Orwell would be another. “Bad Blood” doesn’t come close to either of those two and instead we get Carreyrou depicting himself as a caring husband, father, and superhero journalist.
If you were paying attention, the Theranos story wrote itself. “Bad Blood” ends in December 2016, but the game of musical chairs at Theranos wasn’t over. What transpired in 2017-18 was more important than any two years during the company’s history. What was the point of publishing the book when the story wasn’t over? Money, of course. Knopf Publishing wanted to be the first one to the Theranos gold mine.
When Carreyrou’s first story on Theranos ran in the Wall Street Journal in October 2015, the writing was on the wall that the company wasn’t what it proclaimed to be. Had Carreyrou’s first report dropped in 2010, then that would have been an impressive piece of investigative journalism.
“Bad Blood” was written in a hurry, which might explain the absence of many important details. The book was designed to convince readers that this was the definitive story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.
Early on, Carreyrou relies on personal anecdotes intended to provide insight into Elizabeth Holmes. How are we supposed to know if the stories are true? And how did Carreyrou know what to believe? Since when did hearsay become a legitimate source for journalists? I wouldn’t believe anything Elizabeth Holmes, Noel Holmes, Christian Holmes IV, or Christian Holmes V told me.
In many ways, Carreyrou mythologizes Elizabeth Holmes. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to think he wrote parts of the book with Elizabeth's mother, Noel Holmes, standing over his shoulder.
Example:
“The afternoons were whiled away playing Monopoly. When Elizabeth was ahead, which was most of the time, she would insist on playing on to the bitter end, piling on the houses and hotels for as long as it took for David and Christian to go broke. When she occasionally lost, she stormed off in a fury and, more than once, ran right through the screen of the condo’s front door. It was an early glimpse of her intense competitive streak.”
This early childhood anecdote requires closer introspection. As Carreyrou tells it, a young, ambitious Holmes would run through a screen door if she didn’t win at Monopoly? How does a young child run through a screen door, and not only once, but on multiple occasions? Why didn’t they throw the board game away or keep the screen door open when it was apparent Elizabeth was about to lose? Assuming she ran through a screen door, that means she would have broken it and a new door would have been installed. That couldn’t have been convenient. How many screen doors did she break? Was Carreyrou was shown video evidence of Elizabeth running through a screen door? Furthermore, how is this important?
The question that should be asked is, who told him the Monopoly story? Why did he believe it? As readers, are we supposed to believe such stories? And what should we make of this line, “an early glimpse of her intense competitive streak”?
According to her parents, when Elizabeth was seven, she “filled a notebook” with ideas for a time machine. Where is this notebook? Again, why should we believe this?
Example 2:
In high school, Elizabeth wasn’t part of the popular crowd. By then, her father had moved the family to Houston to take a job at the conglomerate Tenneco. The Holmes children attended St. John’s, Houston’s most prestigious private school. A gangly teenage girl with big blue eyes, Elizabeth bleached her hair in an attempt to fit in and struggled with an eating disorder.
St. John’s isn’t merely Houston’s most prestigious private school, it’s one of the most elite K-12 academies nationwide. Annual tuition starts at roughly $30,000. Legacy students make up 75 percent of the enrollment. For non-legacy applicants, one can only imagine the waiting list. Elizabeth’s parents did not attend St John’s, so how did their children jump to the front of the school’s decades-long waiting list?
Carreyrou doesn’t mention that Noel Holmes worked for the US House of Representatives Charlie Wilson (D-Tx). Noel was a member of the all-female group known on Capitol Hill as “Charlie’s Angels.” She was Wilson’s foreign policy aide to Afghanistan, a sobering thought if there was one.
Wilson represented the 2nd Congressional District of Texas (1973-96)) when, and coincidentally, it was home to St. John’s Academy. Although a theory, there should be little doubt that someone high on the food chain pulled a few strings to get Elizabeth and her brother, Christian V, into the elite school. Christian would later be expelled from St. John’s for what Carreyrou mentions was a “projector prank.” Given how hard it is to be expelled from elite academies, one can only imagine what Christian’s prank entailed.
Elizabeth began St. John’s as a sixth-grader. The “gangly teenage girl” with “bleached” hair and an “eating disorder” would come later, I suppose. As a high school student, Holmes was a member of the cross country team. According to her teammates, in every race Holmes competed in, she finished last. What happened to that competitive streak from her Monopoly phase?
Also, Elizabeth was fond of bragging to her peers about how Lorenzo Lamas was her step-uncle by marriage. After her grandfather Christian III divorced her grandmother, Elizabeth Lott, he married the actress Arlene Dahl, who had been previously married to Fernando Lamas. The couple produced a son, Lorenzo Lamas, the actor from the TV series ‘Falcon Crest.”
As Carreyrou notes, it wasn’t until she was a sophomore that Holmes became a straight-A student. Did Carreyrou see her report cards? Until I see them, I’ll remain skeptical of her high school academic performance.
According to Richard Fuisz, who was friends with the Holmes family when they lived in Washing D.C., Elizabeth was a poor student. In 2019, Fuisz told Forbes that “Noel programmed Elizabeth to be like me, invent and learn a language,” and that she was a “fair student with low grades.” Who should we believe?
Fuisz was also in the CIA. His role in the Theranos saga hasn’t received enough attention. CIA agents are skilled at creating confusion, often their field weapon of choice. Whenever I read a quote from Fuisz, I can’t discern if what he’s saying is true. I wonder how Carreyrou determined if Fuisz’s version of events were accurate?
Example:
The Fuiszes took them out to a nice restaurant to celebrate Noel’s fortieth birthday. Lorraine arranged the outing to make up for the fact that Chris hadn’t thrown his wife a party.
Carreyrou seizes upon every chance to throw Elizabeth’s father, Chris Holmes IV, under the bus. Is there a rule that says when your wife turns 40 you’re obligated to throw her a party? Maybe he was traveling for work? Better still, who cares? And again, consider the source. Who told Carreyrou this story? How is it important to the Theranos narrative?
Carreyrou has nothing nice to say about Chris Holmes IV, yet if anyone in the Theranos saga deserves our sympathy it would be him. Instead of including anecdotes that probably aren’t true, the book would have been better had it contained more facts instead of hearsay.
Here’s an example that offers a glimpse of Chris Holmes IV:
I can’t think of another example that relies heavily on second-hand accounts of stories only bolster a narrative. Since when did that become acceptable journalism?
Example:
During one excursion the families made together to the zoo, Justin Fuisz remembers, Elizabeth’s younger brother, Christian, told him, “My dad thinks your dad is an asshole.” When Justin later repeated the comment to his mother, Lorraine chalked it up to jealousy.
Here we have a moment shared between two young children that we’re meant to accept as a factual account. Christian V was born in 1986. How old would a child have to be before they could say, “My dad thinks your dad is an asshole”? Also, according to Carreyrou’s timeline, the Holmes family was living in Woodside, California in the late 80s and early 90s. So, when did this excursion happen? Who was the source? And why is it important? This isn’t investigative journalism, it’s gossip.
Elizabeth arrived at Stanford in January 2002. Incoming freshmen usually begin college in the fall of the same year they graduate from high school. Carreyrou tells us that Elizabeth was a President’s Scholar. See if you can find evidence of this online. I found the recipients of the President’s Scholar award for 2001, which wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t find the list for 2002. (When searching online for information about Holmes and her ex-boyfriend, Sunny Balwani, you’ll discover how hard it is. It’s almost as if someone had access to Google’s algorithm and programmed it so it would be difficult or to find information on the Theranos power couple. I’ve never felt this way about any subject I’ve researched.)
Until I see Holmes’s name on a list confirming she was a recipient of Stanford’s President’s Scholar award, I have no reason to believe she was. Also, what did Elizabeth do after she graduated from St. John’s, between May 2001 and January 2002? Was she studying Mandarin in Beijing? I’ve read a few reports that claim Elizabeth met Sunny Balwani at Berkeley in 2001. Carreyrou says they met in Beijing when Elizabeth was being bullied by her peers, another story I don’t believe. One annoying trend in American journalism is what I call the “bully card.” Who hasn’t been a victim of bullying at least once? The bully card is a gimmick played by a writer designed to garner sympathy for a character, in this case, Elizabeth Holmes.
Has anyone heard Elizabeth Holmes speak Mandarin? In Ken Auletta’s New Yorker profile of Holmes (December 2014), Channing Robertson recounts the time he told Elizabeth if she wanted to study at the Genome Institute in Singapore (GIS) she would have to know Mandarin. Carreyrou should have thrown a flag on this one. It took me less than 30 seconds to discover that English is the lingua franca at GIS.
Carreyrou also claims that Elizabeth was a childhood friend of Tim Cook Draper’s daughter when they were neighbors in Woodside, California. My research indicates that Tim Draper never lived in Woodside, however, his father Gilbert Draper did, but nowhere near the Holmes family.