The New York Times has a lengthy new profile of Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos maven who was supposed to report to a Texas prison last month for a 11.25-year sentence. (After making a last-minute request, that was pushed back to an as-yet-undetermined date, possibly due to her recently giving birth to a second child.) The piece finds a very different Holmes than the one seen in public: a relaxed mother of two in a healthy marriage — that is, if you can trust that someone convicted of fraud isn’t simply trying to deceive a reporter. It also unearths a secret that should shock exactly no one: That ridiculous low voice? Yep, it’s a fake.
“In case you’re wondering,” writes reporter Amy Chozick, “Ms. Holmes speaks in a soft, slightly low, but totally unremarkable voice, no hint of the throaty contralto she used while running her defunct blood-testing start-up Theranos.”
But that’s not all she claims she was faking. She claims that the Elizabeth Holmes seen in interviews, at presentations, and in courtrooms or in award-winning TV shows — the one with the low voice and the Steve Job-ian black turtlenecks — was a “character” she created when she was a 19-year-old who founded a biotech company.
“I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn’t have good technical ideas,” she claimed. “Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn’t.”
Throughout the piece, which found her spending several days with Holmes and her family, Chozick finds herself questioning whether she can trust that the calm and reserved version of the disgraced Theranos honcho is itself also a character. Perhaps “Liz” — who works at a rape-crisis hotline and gives off the vibe of being “normal” — is as much a fiction as the “Elizabeth” who speaks with a thoroughly unconvincing fake voice.
(NYT)