Inside Theranos with Elizabeth Holmes

“EVERY PERSON THAT WORKED ON THIS MOVIE WAS GOING THROUGH A SIMILAR FEELING of cognitive dissonance,” Lance Oppenheim, the documentary director, said recently of You Can See Everything, the film he made with Nathan Fielder about the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. “We would unpack the day’s events, and no one could agree on the seemingly mundane moments that would transpire.”

When I read that, I felt a wave of relief. Even gratitude. Because in 2016, I spent two days inside Theranos with Holmes as her company collapsed and she moved towards the federal fraud conviction that forms the backdrop of the new film. I still do not understand what happened in that building.

Her idea was that she would use me to systematically stage scenes for a documentary film that would rebut a wide variety of accusations against her, starting with the charge that her technology could not, in fact, take a drop of blood and produce medically reliable test results, all the way down to the suggestions that she had no friends, was odd, mean to her staff, a diva, and not good at running. She also wanted to lodge the counter-charge that there was a grand conspiracy to bring her down.

My idea was that we would bring two crews and film her attempting to create this Potemkin reality, then present it all so people could judge for themselves. Was this just Steve Jobs-ian reality distortion, necessary for success in a new era, as Holmes’s supporters argued? Or was it the kind of cartoonish, sociopathic wrong a small child could identify?

In the end it fell apart. I’m glad it did, and am grateful that Oppenheim and Fielder have made something better. But I still feel compelled to try and make some sense of an episode that remains creepy and unsettling to me.

Theranos was founded in 2003 when Holmes was 19. A decade later it was valued at $9 billion. Holmes had a board filled with aged luminaries (Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, David Boies) and would take investments and advice from Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison among many others. She was anointed by a breathless tech press as the latest mythical, eccentric founder. At one point the fever for putting her on the covers of things was so intense that Forbes ran a picture of her with no accompanying story.

The fall began in October 2015, when the Wall Street Journal ran a series of investigative stories which alleged that the company’s first proprietary blood testing technology, a machine known as Edison, did not work as advertised; and that Holmes knew this but kept forging onwards despite the risks to her customers’ health. (I’m sure she still disputes all of this. So I’ll note these are allegations, although ones supported now by a federal conviction.)

The first time I actually spoke to her was in the late summer of 2016 just after the company had crashed and laid off 340 people, amid at least eight shareholder lawsuits and investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as ongoing scrutiny from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

I had written her a letter saying that I felt she had been too hyped, and then too vilified, and that I wanted to find the real person in the midst of all of that. Apparently it resonated, and I entered an interminable series of conversations with her P.R. team, whose main functions seemed to me to be to 1) believe her and 2) to treat her with a hushed and fawning reverence.

They told me a story in which they had taken Holmes for dinner at San Francisco’s most exclusive vegan restaurant, but found when they arrived that it had communal seating, which they found unsuitable for a figure of her stature. So they sought the second best vegan restaurant, which was a bit of a dive. But Holmes found no problem with the dive, and they had a great time. I still am not totally sure what I was supposed to take away from it.

They seemed to be feeling out whether I was a believer or not. In practice this meant I had to maintain a truly embarrassing level of credulity. I recall at one point telling them she was “doing God’s work” and dying a little inside. On that same call, the P.R. guy asked me to hold, and then a strange voice came over the line.

“It’s Elizabeth Holmes.” Then silence.

I sensed she wanted something of me, that I was expected to do or be something, but had no idea what. I just said hello. “I understand we’ll be making a film together,” she said. I replied that I hoped so, and then she hung up. The P.R. guy called back immediately, to say “Wasn’t that amazing?” My honest answer was no. But I refrained from saying so, which got me to their offices.

Theranos occupied a green-glass building on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto on the site of a former Wall Street Journal printing plant. It also served as the exterior of the venture capital firm Raviga in the HBO series Silicon Valley.

As I entered the office, the nature of reality seemed to change. Holmes was only to be referred to as a great and revolutionary figure undermined by a conspiracy of fools, as Galileo had been before her. (I don’t recall if she was explicitly compared to him, but she was often likened to figures of his ilk.) Even mentioning the allegations felt dangerous. It was as if I had entered a mental hospital and had to be careful not to upset the inmates.

The lobby was glossy white, like the headquarters in Men in Black, but with accents in hospital scrubs green, and, because Holmes liked to wash her hands a lot, little gold sinks on pedestals. It was surrounded by conference rooms named after scientific and medical pioneers including Isaac Newton and Jonas Salk.

I checked in with security, who I was told had been asked to remove their jackets so the company would look less embattled, and took a seat directly in front of a screen showing looped videos. One was an ad for Theranos’s latest blood-testing device, the MiniLab: a neat, white blood-testing box the size of a printer. (Holmes had been banned for two years from running a blood lab, but apparently that did not prevent her selling a device.)

The video, with its close-ups of blood droplets swelling on a fingertip, was clearly inspired by Jurassic Park. (It struck me that whoever had drawn from that movie had not watched it to the end.) A small disclaimer noted that the product had not yet been approved by the F.D.A.

Next, the screen showed a selection of letters from members of the public praising Holmes. It highlighted particular quotes about the importance of the work she was doing, and her bravery in the face of an army of critics.

After an hour or so, I was taken to a small room, which effectively became my office for the next two days. I even had lunch in the canteen with the other employees. It was a budget-conscious selection of sandwich makings and snack foods — Kashi bars, potato chips, mini candy bars. It felt like school.

Often, her P.R. people came by. One told me the vegan restaurant story again. Another began to tell me about a conspiracy several times, before silencing herself out of what she said was fear.

Before I met Holmes, it seemed to me, I would have to affirm (or at least not deny) by my words and gestures that she was an extraordinary and benevolent yet humble person who had been wronged. On the second day, they said she would see me.

I sat, along with seven or eight P.R. people, in a pristine, glassy conference room with a long, surfboard-shaped boardroom table at its center. I wondered how much it cost. I guessed hundreds of thousands. The boardroom table suppliers of Palo Alto are the real killers of the tech industry.

I wondered too how the plumbing worked in this building. Whether they’d had to run lines for each of the gold sinks, and how much venture capital had gone into that endeavor.

Since that first brief call with Holmes, I had spoken to someone who had been present when she had met with Boies and Murdoch, among others. This person described a profound bewitching of these older men. I wanted to be bewitched too.

Because if these men had been fooled by the videos I’d seen, and the person I’d spoken to, and the arguments I’d heard, and the affectation of naming conference rooms after geniuses, then I’d have had to accept that nobody truly knows anything in this world. And I wasn’t ready for that yet.

Holmes kept us all waiting for what I recall as about an hour before sweeping in, in a cloud of disingenuous apology, wearing a plain white shirt with a down vest over it, and necklace of large beads.

She seemed extraordinarily sad and angry to me. The only thing I can compare it to is meeting someone who has suffered severe trauma early in life. Her team either knew better, did not feel it, or were pretending they could not. They emanated grateful deference.

She appeared to me in two dimensions, somehow, and my notes tell me that every sentence she said was “a perfect confection of buzzword nothing. I cannot remember a single thing she said. Not one. One of the most newsworthy women on the planet. Not a phrase. Nothing.”

I did note that she herself told me the story about the vegan restaurant. Her team laughed anew at all the appropriate points. I tried not to catch their eyes. She also told me that the F.D.A. loved their product, and praised it in private. Nobody disabused her of this notion. It was like we were trying not to disillusion a child.

Over that meeting, and in a celebratory continuation of it at a nearby bar after Holmes had departed, she and her team laid out the film they wanted me to make. Holmes believed a childhood friend had come after her, owing to his personal jealousy and perhaps unrequited love. They suspected that the testing company Quest Diagnostics was also involved in the conspiracy. And they argued that the Wall Street Journal reporter, John Carreyrou, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing Theranos’ problems, had a personal vendetta against her, and was motivated by money. They wanted these angles investigated.

She and Serena Williams were friends, I was told, and often discussed the role that gender had played in their public perception. It struck me that Williams had never claimed to have won a tennis match she had not, and that even if she had, nobody’s health would be at risk. But I said nothing and agreed that that was something worth looking into.

There were also oddly specific scenes they had in mind. In some coverage, she had been accused of being mean to her staff. So she wanted to stage a scene in which she was kind to her driver, described to me as a former Navy SEAL named Jim.

She wanted me to have dinner with her and her brother, Christian, who seemed to me to be her only actual friend. The two planned to discuss their family history, and how normal and kind she was.

That idea somehow morphed into the notion that we would rent out the bar at the St. Clement hotel, which apparently had a very scenic fire pit, and fill it with dozens of members of her team. We would then film Holmes socializing, perhaps reducing the group to guffaws with some witticism, as if these were her friends not her employees.

She then wanted me to be at her home when she woke up, so we could witness her making a vegan juice and then she and I would go running together. The idea was that she would seem like a balanced and fit person. I worried she might be some chief executive ultra-marathoner who would leave me in the dust. (When I saw the footage of her running with Fielder in the new film, I realized that would not have been an issue.)

I returned to the hotel, in the middle of the city, late that night. I felt drained, and sad, and somehow unclean. I wasn’t sure I could maintain the pretense enough to film all of that, and also film the process. I knew I was eliding the truth in my dealings with the company, telling myself it was in service of a greater truth.

The hotel bed dipped in the middle. The light was fluorescent, but also somehow dull. The wardrobe sagged, and its doors were misaligned. The carpet had been reduced to the texture of leather by wear, and smelled like the bag from a vacuum cleaner. The hotel had no food, and it was a relief to order delivery from a pleasantly sanitized app that made every restaurant look delicious. It didn’t arrive, so I went out to pick it up.

It was raining. I didn’t realize that the restaurant was in the Tenderloin district, home to many of the single room occupancy hotels which are essentially the city’s homeless shelters. Over time the district has just become where the homeless gather at night. The police seem to leave them to it. It felt like another small zone where the nature of reality is different.

The streets near the hotel were empty, but as I turned once, twice, figures seemed to drift in from the distance, at first at the corners of my eyes, then gradually in little clumps. They were fighting, shouting, twitching, pissing, staggering. One man was injecting himself in the stomach with a huge needle. There was a smell in the air like wet canvas. Without coordinating, they seemed to flock around me. I felt both their need, their seeking for something, and my own inability to provide it. I felt the contrast between the idiot money I had been surrounded by all day, and the profound deprivation that surrounded it.

I found the restaurant, which didn’t look at all the way it did on the app. But I picked up the food, in greasy and collapsing paper boxes with tabs that kept popping open. I didn’t want to interact with the city any more. I waited until I couldn’t see the group any longer, and then made a run for it.

Back in New York, the film fell apart in a series of calls. I don’t recall exactly why, but the underlying factor was that I could no longer pretend. I had to reassert my integrity, however belatedly. I did some version of that, and they sensed what was behind it, and it was over.

When I was going through my old notes, I found a list I’d written to myself of all the things I did wrong, all the flaws I’d shown, in the process of trying to make this film. It was sad to read.

Not because I was wrong. I assuredly was too inexperienced to pull off a film of the sophistication I was attempting. But because I could see, with the distance of time, how lost I’d been after debasing myself to a lie, maintained at any cost, any hurt, to make one lost soul feel worthwhile and popular and human.

This story was published in association with Air Mail.