Why is the New York Times soft-launching Elizabeth Holmes’s rebrand?
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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To the criminal court that convicted her, Elizabeth Holmes is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of defrauding investors of nearly $145 million. To the patients who used the Theranos testing that she knew did not work, Holmes is a cold-blooded sociopath who put countless lives at risk for her own personal gain. To the employees she terrorized along the way, Holmes is the textbook workplace abuser.
But to the New York Times, Holmes is just “Liz,” a “devoted mother” who is “modest but mesmerizing.” In a glossy Sunday feature inexplicably billed as straight news, Amy Chozick illustrates exactly how someone as charmless and porcine as Holmes managed to dupe the entire white-collar class in the first place.
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“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,” Chozick writes in her hagiography.
The problem is not that Chozick identifies Elizabeth, the turtlenecked girlboss who hid her utter lack of intellect beneath a fried bottle-blonde mane and baritone timbre, as a character. It’s that Chozick lets herself buy into the notion that “Liz,” the “gentle and charismatic” mother captured in the New York Times’s disgustingly soft-focused pictorials, is any more Holmes’s authentic self rather than just her latest persona to serve her new sole goal in life: to escape her 11-year prison sentence and any further consequences of her actions.
As the first journalist to gain direct access to Holmes since 2016, Chozick spends worryingly little time on the criminal proceedings against Holmes. But Chozick’s credulity is instructive.
“Over antioxidant smoothies, Ms. Holmes told me she has ideas for Covid testing, drawing on her work in a Singapore lab as a college student during the SARS outbreak,” Chozick writes. “She maintains the idealistic delusion of a 19-year-old, never mind that she’s 39 with a fraud conviction, telling me she is still working on health care-related inventions and would continue to do so behind bars.”
Is Holmes actually idealistic? Or does it serve as her last-ditch attempt to appeal to her frankly sexist assumption that mothers deserve a “Get Out of Jail Free” card?
This, of course, brings us to the sickest part of the story as a whole. Holmes, whose tests gave false miscarriage diagnoses and imperiled terminal cancer patients, is allowed by the New York Times to use her children as props, both in print and in the pictures. Far from getting the same photography treatment as women who run afoul of the New York Times editorial page, Holmes and her husband get to pose on the beach with their babies. Although Chozick notes that Holmes’s relentless baby-making annoyed the judge, who was forced to postpone her trial as a result, Chozick chalks this up to Holmes’s advanced age — as though it was a mere coincidence that Holmes only started pushing out infants once it could keep her out of jail.
The real story here is not that Holmes has gone through any journey or accepted any accountability for her actions. Rather, it is that Holmes, who was so comically farcical in her first persona that managed to dupe Cabinet officials and billionaires, is capable of duping the paper of record with an even more laughable facade. Liz the Mommy is no more convincing a con than Elizabeth the Girlboss, yet elite gatekeepers from politics to C-suites continue to buy the ruse.