Inmate #24965-111: Elizabeth Holmes, Two Years In

“I didn’t know how this case would end. But I always wanted to be a mom. I always wanted a family. It was my dream—my whole life—since I was a little girl. It’s how I made it through everything. I wanted a partner. I wanted this family. And I feel so lucky. I have it now.” — Elizabeth Holmes

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Earlier this week, my circle gathered in Newport Beach for brunch at our favorite spot—poached eggs, oat milk lattes, and our seasonal attempt to sync up before summer releases our children and scatters our families across different orbits, continents, and time zones. Once school lets out, the odds of coordinating anything with this group drop off completely.

As always, our table conversation circled trending topics. We drifted from Hollywood gossip to the horrors revealed in the Diddy trial, to pesticides, and eventually, prison reform. A meandering segue carried us from glyphosate to Elizabeth Holmes—and whether nonviolent white-collar offenders should be locked away at all.

With violent crime spiking and prisons overflowing, my friend posed the question: Is it logical to incarcerate people like Holmes?

She’d followed the trial and questioned the spectacle of it. She saw it as ritualized public shaming, engineered to reduce Holmes—a complicated figure behind a complicated crime—into a villain tailor-made for federal theater.

It echoed a theory I’m quite familiar with. Ghislaine Maxwell, too, was reduced to a two-dimensional foil—so thoroughly reviled that by the time her 20-year sentence was handed down, there was no appetite for skepticism or nuance. No one dared ask why one woman was serving the sentence of several nameless men. And when I floated the idea—midway through her trial to a table of reporters—that Maxwell might be counted as Epstein’s first victim, their unease was palpable. True, possibly. But entertaining a narrative that deviated from the media's decided script was too destabilizing to ponder or discuss.

Men—guilty of far worse—are granted texture. Their crimes, cushioned by context. They’re allowed to be tragic, misunderstood.

My fascination with this imbalance goes back to the ’90s. Leona Helmsley, the self-anointed “Queen of Mean,” a high-society hotel magnate who became the face of flashy, femme white-collar crime. Martha Stewart fits the genre too—though she emerged intact and thriving, thank God. An exception to the rule.

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My friend assumed Holmes was already part of my usual rotation of fallen female figures. She was surprised when I admitted how little I actually knew beyond the headlines, the podcasts, and the series of stylized profiles charting her descent from biotech prodigy to sociopathic fraud. I never saw Amanda Seyfried’s Emmy-winning portrayal of Holmes, but I read about how precisely she captured her glacial gaze, punctuated by a slash of red lipstick and the signature black turtleneck worn in homage to her role model, Steve Jobs—so well, in fact, that Jennifer Lawrence reportedly turned down the film version.

Holmes was intriguing because she was young and convincing—I knew that much. She’d seduced billionaires into funding a machine that promised to revolutionize medicine with a single drop of blood. I vaguely recall footage of her surrender—walking into prison in a sweater, calm and uncuffed, the ease of a suburban mom at school drop-off, disappearing into the scrublands of minimum-security confinement in Bryan, Texas, as the cameras trailed her descent.

She was cast as cold and calculating: a woman who weaponized femininity to defraud investors who trusted her vision. From what I’d absorbed, she served as a cautionary parable of unchecked ego and ambition punished. Unlike male founders who stumble and rebound, Holmes was positioned as ideally irredeemable—a narrative the media devoured.

Over a power grain bowl scattered with roasted cauliflower, oyster mushrooms, potatoes, and collard greens, my friend leaned in and likened the fall of Theranos to a Salem hunt. Knowing a witch to burn is always an angle of interest, she joked that had Holmes emerged just a few years later, she might’ve landed a spot in RFK Jr.’s rogue, unorthodox lineup at HHS.

Did she have a point?

I wasn’t sure. But later that night, I started reading—and fell down the rabbit hole.

I hadn’t realized Holmes had been acquitted on all charges related to patients—that Theranos had conducted somewhere between 8.5-12.5 million blood tests, and the prosecution had presented just 4 patient cases involving potentially inaccurate results. (The actual number of tests is hard to pin down. The government claimed to have “lost” the only copy of the database that had these numbers, then, according to unreleased court documents, accused Elizabeth of destroying it.)

4. Out of 12 million?

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I was stunned to learn she never sold a single share of Theranos stock—even while holding $4.5 billion in equity. What’s more, she put $30 million from a personal insurance payout back into the company, trying to save it.

Compared to Madoff or Bankman-Fried, who personally stole and profited billions, she didn’t quite fit the mold.

Daniel Warmenhoven, a former board member, wrote: “She is a genuinely good person with a good heart. She took a meager salary. Never sold a share. After 15 years, she was virtually penniless.”

An engineer insisted parts of the machine worked. “Iterative and messy,” he said. “Like most early medical tech.”

A separate staffer wrote: “This was never about greed. She believed in what she was building. She took stock, not cash.”

If she didn’t steal, or run, or cash out—what exactly warrants the intense hatred of her that lingers today?

I turned to Grok: “Did anyone die from Theranos?”

Grok replied: “No confirmed deaths have been directly attributed to Theranos or its blood-testing technology. While the company’s tests were flawed and unreliable—resulting in some patients receiving incorrect results—there is no public record or legal finding that anyone died as a direct result. The case centered on financial fraud, not medical malpractice. Even Judge Edward Davila acknowledged the emotional weight of patient deception, but reinforced that the convictions were strictly investor-based.”

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While Holmes is serving her sentence for defrauding investors, current headlines highlight a new endeavor by her partner, Billy Evans—a tall, handsome California hotel heir whose startup is reportedly raising funds for what The New York Times calls “a radically new approach to health testing.”

Holmes and Evans first crossed paths in 2017, right as Theranos was crumbling under scrutiny. Their relationship quickly turned serious, with the couple moving in together in San Francisco and getting engaged by August 2018. In 2021, they celebrated the arrival of their first child.

Evans earned his Bachelor of Science in Economics from MIT in 2015.

The company is named Haemanthus, after the blood lily. According to investors, it plans to begin by testing pets for disease before expanding to humans. The beginning goal is to raise $50 million. The vision: “Human health optimization.”

“If sequels are de rigueur in the so-called disruptive world of technology,” The Times wrote, “this one is particularly bold.”

Theranos, at its peak, attracted high-profile investors like Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison. Its board members included names like Henry Kissinger (though none of these men were ever held to the same level of accountability as Holmes, despite selling millions in shares). Holmes, as celebrated founder, graced countless magazine covers and White House dinners.

Haemanthus will test blood, saliva, and urine. Now, the woman who once vowed to change the future of medicine is raising two young children in the shadow of an empire some believe was the result of faulty vision rather than outright elaborate fraud.

Holmes maintains her innocence.

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Today marks two years since she reported to federal prison in Bryan—95 miles northwest of Houston. Her 11-year sentence has since been reduced to 9 for good behavior. She spends her days on a regimented schedule: morning workouts, mostly vegan meals (after getting sick on some of the meat-based options that came with a “not for human consumption” label), as well as helping some inmates with their cases and counseling rape victims, and drafting policy proposals for criminal justice reform. One of them, reportedly, is a bill to reinforce the presumption of innocence in criminal trials.

Billy brings their children—William, 3, and Invicta, 2—for weekly visits. According to People magazine, they sit and color with crayons, build Legos, hunt for insects in the grass. Holmes calls these visits the highlight of her life inside.

When they end, she says, she unravels.

“It shatters my world every single time,” she told People. “When I’m with Billy, I feel infinity. It’s why I want to fight for love and fight for my family—because I know what it means.”

Critics framed her pregnancies as ploys for sympathy, to avoid jail time. She denies it.

“I know what the perception is. I understand why people say that,” she said. “I didn’t know how this case would end. But I always wanted to be a mom. I always wanted a family. It was my dream—my whole life—since I was a little girl. It’s how I made it through everything. I wanted a partner. I wanted this family. And I feel so lucky. I have it now.

“It wasn’t planned in the sense that I got pregnant knowing I was going to trial. But I always wanted to be a mother. I feel so lucky to have met Billy and to have our kids.”

I guess I’m wondering what we think of it all—of her, specifically.

Who was she then? Who is she now?

And if our system is designed to flatten women like her into cautionary tales tailor-made for public shame and quiet erasure—who, exactly, gets to decide?