Soft-Focus Sunday: Unearned Redemptions and Gauzy Portrayals
In this issue: Elizabeth "Just Call Me Liz" Holmes; Kissinger gets the gentlest whisper of a kiss from CBS News; softballs all around. Just another day in the content mines.
Changing your image after a scandal to project a more relatable, down-to-earth, or innocent-seeming version of yourself is a PR tactic older than God. Just as Elizabeth Holmes deliberately wore gender-flipped Steve Jobs cosplay to project the eccentric tech genius trope, she’s dropped the comically low voice and traded the black-on-black outfits and C-suite riot grrrl makeup for that Ann Taylor Loft earth-tone motif popular among suburban moms.
The baffling New York Times story that seemingly champions this metamorphosis is titled “Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth.”
Wait, you’re telling me a con artist and a felon wants you to forget about all the bad shit they’ve done? Now I’ve heard everything.
The writer of this piece seems to be aware that she’s been taken in by this maternal rebrand and admits as much. Still, it’s hard to stomach scenes where the writer is so clearly being rolled:
I realized that I was essentially writing a story about two different people. 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.
No, they are the same person. The woman who “can’t stomach R-rated movies” could stomach badgering, threatening, and gaslighting her chief scientist into suicide, according to his widow.
Holmes dazzled those men with influence because she was able to clock who they wanted her to be and become it, just as she was able to clock the version of herself this journalist would mostly likely sympathize it and perform it. This article could easily be headlined “Manipulator Manipulates” because the reader gets to watch it happen in real time, like in this little tableau where she Holmes laments leaving her children behind when she eventually begins her 11-year prison sentence for fraud.
The last day I spent with Ms. Holmes, I parked and walked up the long driveway to find her and Mr. Evans embracing in the kitchen. They looked like they were slow dancing, swaying slightly, the two of them against the world. Fireplace burning. Seagulls flying overhead. Teddy drooling in his crate. Babies (plural) sleeping.
Mr. Evans left for a workout, saying he doesn’t want “dad bod.” 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. 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.
The most genuinely fascinating story in the piece concerns a post-Therano “Liz” meeting her significantly younger, MIT-educated boyfriend flush with generational wealth. A major score to have a few kids with, especially when you’re basically unemployable thanks to defrauding all your former business partners.
So how did she reel this new mark in? Through a meet-cute at a party, of course.
In 2017, as Theranos faced an onslaught of legal challenges, both civil and criminal, Ms. Holmes moved to San Francisco, where she met a recent M.I.T. graduate and entrepreneur, Billy Evans, at a house party during Fleet Week to benefit wounded warriors. Mr. Evans had gone out to get ice for a party he was hosting at his own apartment and a friend texted to ask if he was going to the benefit. He agreed to swing by for a few minutes and never made it to back to his party.
A mutual friend introduced him to Ms. Holmes and the pair talked for three hours. “My friends were texting, ‘Where are you? We’re here,” Mr. Evans recalled. “To say we immediately fell in love isn’t an overstatement.”
Mr. Evans was 25 and living with roommates in San Francisco, but in many ways he was more mature than Ms. Holmes. She was 32 and had never opened a bottle of wine.
The article suggests that Billy didn’t know Holmes was the infamous Theranos founder or that he was vaguely unaware of the company’s implosion when he met her. What did she tell this dude when he asked her the basic getting-to-know-you questions like where she’d from or what she does for a living? What does she tell people about herself when she’s encountering someone who is a blank slate? What vulnerability in him did she recognize and exploit? In that moment, who did she become based on what she saw in him? We don’t get the answers to those questions, but we do get this glamour shot of the happy couple at the beach:
Former Theranos board member Henry Kissinger also got the soft-focus treatment by CBS New Sunday Morning in this gentle “atta boy!” for turning 100 later this month.
Kissinger fanboy Ted Koppel begins this hot-stone massage of a segment with a baffling voice-over: “That Henry Kissinger is still alive will come as news to some people.”
Ted, you’re clearly not on Twitter because any time someone who actually made the world better dies an untimely death, the former secretary of state trends. Plenty of people know that this man responsible for a body count in the actual millions still draws the breath of life. They just don’t understand why he gets the privilege of living to see old age given the destruction he has wrought.
Hope that helps.
Till next time.
xoxo,
M.