Does what happened in undergrad matter now?
In the spring of my freshman year at Stanford, I pledged a sorority, which is how I came to find myself on the dance floor of Sigma Chi one night in 2003, when another pledge pointed to a guy across the room and said, Watch out for him.
The next day over lunch, she explained why. He’d raped a girl. Or, not raped, exactly. Something had happened with some girl he’d gotten drunk, and she’d gone to the University and said it was assault. The University had let him off, but still: better to steer clear.
I registered the information the way one does, and didn’t think anything more of it, except once at a party when said guy offered me a drink and I politely declined.
Fast forward thirteen years and I was back on Stanford’s campus for my ten year undergraduate reunion.
Ours was a funny class.
Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram, certainly did well, and Amy Aniobi, who’d just launched “Insecure” with Issa Ray, was a particular hero of mine.
There were all the kids who’d gone to work at Facebook and netted enviable fortunes, as well as those of us who had mocked them for not getting real jobs while donning our suits for Lehman interviews. And then there was Mike Rothenberg, the recently disgraced Venture Capital fund founder, who showed up to the event with a (very cute) Emotional Support Puppy.
But the classmate whose presence was most giddily anticipated was, of course, Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, the start-up blood-testing company a reporter had recently declared a $9 billion dollar fraud.
She did not disappoint.
I was standing under a palm tree with my dear friend B, taking in the sunny day scene, when we noticed heads starting to turn, and spotted her figure on the lawn, dressed in beige and wearing a broad-rimmed hat.
Her straight posture and pleasantly taut face suggested a woman not-unhappily conscious of being looked at, and I watched her eyes take on that now-notorious blue bigness as she shook the hand of a friend’s spouse to whom she was being introduced.
“It’s just so weird,” B mused at my side.
“That she showed up you mean?” I asked, because she had, after all, only made it through freshman year.
“No, just given everything that’s happening with Sigma Chi,” he said.
I turned to him, confused.
B was a Sigma Chi alum and, as such, was privy to the fraternity’s revived conflict with the University. Stanford was trying to kick the group off campus, either because of sexual assault allegations or because they wanted the house’s prime real estate, depending on whose side you took.
“What does that have to do with Elizabeth Holmes?” I asked.
He cocked a brow: “You don’t know?”
I looked back at him, blank, but felt my stomach grow uneasy.
He must have noticed, because then he asked, “Are you sure you want to?”
Like a lot of people, I followed Elizabeth’s rise with a mix of pride that a woman from our set could find such success and mild envy that she’d actually created the life so many of us once dreamed we one day one.
When she started to get really big though – the mainstream magazine covers, the paparazzi-style reporting – I braced myself for her fall, and wasn’t surprise when it came. No pedestal that high can stay in tact, especially not one stacked on promises of doing something so revolutionary and big.
But I was surprised – no, dumbfounded – by the reporting that brought it down, by the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou.
Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely believed that – as he claimed - Elizabeth had exaggerated her technology’s capabilities and hacked together solutions when it didn’t work. I believed she was difficult to work for and had eccentric personal habits. I believed that her company was overvalued and that she and others over-identified her character with that of Steve Jobs.
It’s just, like…had Carreyrou been to Silicon Valley?
Every fact he presented as a scandal was, if you’d spent any time in the higher echelons of the start-up world, pretty par for the course. WeWork’s Adam Neumann’s speeches made Prosperity preachers look rational; Travis Kalanick’s “ask for forgiveness, not permission” approach to Uber was notorious; and Jack Dorsey’s daily habits were, well…unique. Every other billionaire was paranoid enough to have a spot in a survival bunker somewhere, and billions of dollars were pouring into digital currency that no one really understood. And there were as many kids in Silicon Valley convinced they were the next Steve Jobs as there were next messiahs in Israel and baristas with screenplays in LA.
All of which would have made for an interesting and relevant story to which Theranos’s troubles could have been a provided a lens. A story that examined the risks and rewards this Wild West environment, and asked whether, now that Silicon Valley was becoming such a big part of our world, more controls ought to be in place.
And, indeed, that is likely to be the effect of the actual legal case.
But the story Carreyrou drew was not that. It was, instead, a portrait of a uniquely manipulative female founder who hooked and defrauded the world’s most successful businessmen.
Here again, his contextual comprehension was baffling. He created such a stink about the fact she’d adopted a lower voice, and the Internet ran with it as a sign of her sociopathy. Could I please send him the three women I know whose companies paid for them to have voice lessons to deepen their tone so that they would be taken more seriously? Or perhaps dig up the leadership coach feedback I got in business school advising me to smile less and cut the laugh because it made me seem less credible and intelligent in others’ eyes?
It wasn’t sociopathy: it was what women were aske - and expected - to do then, to overcome the prejudices they were likely to face in a world that wasn’t used to having them lead.
Anyway.
It was all so tone deaf that I figured it would blow over; that Theranos’s valuation would take a hit and some contracts would be cancelled; that the company would, like so many start-ups, pivot or go back underground to figure out why her (obviously promising) technology didn’t always work.
I was, as such, surprised when Nick Bilton, the self-anointed Silicon Valley expert, doubled-down on Carreyrou’s narrative in his reporting about the company for Vanity Fair. Like Elizabeth or not, he at least should know better than to treat her tactics as out-of-the-norm.
I brought it up over dinner one night with T, a friend I knew was friends with Nick Bilton.
“She is a SOCIOPATH,” he said, as soon as the name crossed my lips, so suddenly animated he almost knocked his martini off the bar.
“How do you know that?” I asked. I was surprisingly open to being convinced, particularly by T, whose brain I’ve always admired, but I needed more than that.
“Because I met her!” He exclaimed, “And she is AWFUL!”
He went on to relay the story of his encounter with Elizabeth Holmes at a Vanity Fair party earlier that year. She had spent the whole night talking to him, he’d said, and he’d gotten totally sucked in. The eyes, the intelligence; the way she made you feel really interesting and seen. He’d genuinely thought she was exceptionally special.
But then she’d disappeared, and the next thing he knew, she was getting into a car with Bradley Cooper. Didn’t say goodbye. Didn’t even acknowledge their conversation or his existence before she left.
“She’s so fake,” he said. “Total social climber. And a cocktease.”
He then added, his voice dripping with disdain, “She doesn’t even f* anyone, just flirts to get ahead.”
Then, also, “She’s not even that hot.”
I peered at him from my seat, careful.
Like I said, I really like T. He’s clever and wry; absurdly talented and quirky in the way most interesting people are. He is also rather short and rather round and rather balding and, now well into his fifties, has never figured out the girlfriend piece, despite a lot of effort made.
It was impossible, from my view, not to see the scene from the other side or, for that matter, an objective observer’s. Elizabeth hadn’t been flirting with T; she’d been interesting and interested, the way socially-adept, charismatic people at a cocktail party are. Maybe she had clung to him too much, as one does when nervous in a new and intimidating scene; maybe she had let his name and their conversation run together with all the others she, as a sudden It girl, had surely had. And maybe she had left with Bradley Cooper because he’s Bradley Cooper. But, like, duh.
The thing that was so shocking to me, sitting there, was that T actually didn’t see it. Nor feel any qualm whatsoever about vilifying her in such unapologetic terms.
Later, I heard an interview with Carreyrou in which he guffawed over the fact Elizabeth hadn’t returned his calls, and all I could think was how he said it with the same tone as T. That he didn’t sound like a professional journalist speaking of a CEO who, as head of a ground-breaking start-up, had a lot on her plate, but, rather, like an adolescent boy upset that the pretty girl hadn’t responded to his note, even though he’d once bought her ice cream.
It wasn’t about men versus women, as a lot of people at that point, leapt to say; it was about a certain type of man who didn’t know what to do with a certain type of woman who was smarter and more successful, and who would never care as much about him as he cared about her.
How unfathomably depressing, I thought, that Elizabeth should have cracked the problem of the powerful men who blocked most women from the top, only to find herself dragged down by those beneath her.
This conclusion made sense to me, disheartening though it was, and so I moved my attention on to other things, tucking the insight about men like T away in case it was ever necessary in my own path.
So, when B asked me on that lawn that day if I wanted to know whatever story related Elizabeth to Sigma Chi, I felt some part of myself protest against dragging it all up again, and hate the other part of myself as she overruled and said, “Spill it.”
The story goes like this:
One night in 2003, two senior guys took out two freshman girls, and all four got really drunk.
The guys shared a room in Sigma Chi, where they took the girls back to hook up.
One room, two beds, two couples having sex.
After the fact, Girl A accused Guy A of assault. She took it to the University who, in turn, talked to both guys and Girl B, all of whom said it wasn’t assault. Suffice it to say, this is a terrible position for Girl B, not least because taking the case beyond an internal university investigation would mean that her parents would find out she was drunk and having sex in a frat house instead of studying at the University they’d been so proud for her to attend.
The University evaluated the whole thing and decided it was not assault, which they explained to Girl A, encouraging her to recognize it as an honest misunderstanding that did not warrant ruining the guy’s life.
Girl A was Elizabeth Holmes.
Guy A was the one I’d been warned about that night on the dance floor of Sigma Chi.
I am – clearly – not a journalist, but I felt some culpability for this rumor as it related to the story playing out in the press, and so I called a friend of mine who is, and asked him what I should do.
“You know what you do?” He replied, after hearing the whole account. “You go find a bridge, and you climb up on the rail, and you jump off and kill yourself.”
If his sense of humor doesn’t quite translate into the written word, what he was saying was Dear God help us: this is such a hopelessly demoralizing story out of which there is no win.
Which, of course, I knew.
On the one hand, if Elizabeth is a bad egg, the account would bolster it, showing how she tried to escape her own regrets by ruining an innocent man, whilst also undermining all campus assault allegations which, at the time, were still a nascent niche.
But, on the other: what if she was a victim? What if the University came down on it wrong? What if the trauma of the whole thing – of being both sexually assaulted and condemned in her shame by the University she had worked so hard for the privilege of attending – had been the reason she’d escaped abroad her sophomore year when most people waited til their junior? What if it was the real reason – not Theranos – that she’d dropped out of school, and that she’d gotten swept up in a relationship with a twenty-years-older man who, presumably, gave her some sense of security and protection? What if it was why she had worked so myopically; why she’d kept her guard up, her life private, her body conservatively dressed? What if she wasn’t some mysterious sociopath, she was just a smart and ambitious teenage girl who’d been traumatized and left to fend for herself, and, in the process, internalized the idea that there was no one she could trust, and the best way to get back was to show them all and succeed?
John Carreyrou’s book, Bad Blood, which expanded on his reporting for the Wall Street Journal, came out in 2018. I read it, mostly to see if the rumor B had relayed made it into the text.
I had to wait until the end of the second to last chapter, called “Damage Control,” in which Carreyrou relays Theranos’s reaction to his article bringing it down.
But there it was:
…One approach she favored was to portray me as a misogynist. To generate further sympathy, she suggested she reveal publicly that she had been sexually assaulted as a student at Stanford…
(Carreyrou, Bad Blood, p. 280)
The sentence flows so easily, buried in the center of a paragraph, that it’s easy to swallow, especially when you’ve had 280 pages of priming that she’s the villain in the story.
But when you know that there is something to it, it makes you stop, and ask certain questions like: wait, what sexual assault? You just spent all this time examining a woman’s psyche, and the fact she says she was assaulted in college doesn’t strike you as relevant to her story or who she became? Even by editors, in the height of MeToo?
Carreyrou certainly doesn’t seem the type to pass up a tidbit that would cast Elizabeth in a negative light, which suggests that if he did look into it, whatever he found seemed like too much of a distraction to his overall thesis to discuss. But, in that case: why include it at all?
My guess is that he just wasn’t listening.
And that his book is not one about a sociopath, as he wants it to be, nor one about a young entrepreneur who made some classic mistakes, as it ought to have been. But rather, it’s a book about a modern-day Ahab chasing a whale whose complexity is well out of his league.
***
Last week in my inbox, two emails came through side by side: the first, a reminder about my fifteen year Stanford reunion; the second, a news alert about the upcoming trial of Elizabeth Holmes.
Has it really been five years?
Dear god, a lot had happened.
COVID, MeTo, Trump. Neumann and Kalanick finally went down, albeit with billion-dollar net worths in tact, and the aura of Silicon Valley purity has officially started to fade. Bitcoin is booming and NFTs have joined the fray. I hear there are a few diagnostics start-ups picking up where Theranos’s finger-prick technology left off, and Kylie Jenner has taken over Elizabeth Holmes’s role as youngest self-made female billionaire, having leveraged her Instagram fame to launch a cosmetics line. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s recent reply to a reporter’s request for comment with a poop emoji makes Elizabeth’s 2016 failure to return Carryrou’s calls seem rather quaint.
And yet the story about her remains as sensationalist as ever.
Carreyrou has started a podcast covering the trial, and a copycat from ABC, two films and countless articles continue to expound upon the casting of her as a lilith run amuck.
Her latest actions have only added fuel to their case. Her decision to have a child at 37, and her claim that she was under the unhealthy influence of Sunny Balwani, the twenty-years-her-senior man with whom she started a relationship when she was 19, are both, according to these tellers, nothing more than strategies to illicit sympathy and keep her out of jail.
Insert Eye Roll Emoji here.
Dare I suggest that it’s a bit deft to treat all particularities of womanhood as mere excuses and manipulative ploys? That maybe these are actually aspects of Elizabeth’s story that are worth understanding, particularly as we consider how to get more women into positions of power?
I suppose, when I really challenge myself to assume no greater than average critical thinking capacity, I can understand how Carreyrou comes to these conclusions.
In women’s determination to prove they are equal to men, I think we have learned to downplay the differences, even to ourselves, such that the only time they come to light is when they’ve caused a problem too big to ignore.
But I think we might be at a point where women have gotten far enough that we can actually talk about the fact that it’s different living life – and doing business - as a woman than it is as a man.
Not because we live in a misogynistic culture in which women have it so much harder; just because it’s different, and it’s newer, and we’re all still figuring it out.
It’s harder to raise money as a woman, for instance, but easier to get press. When the press happens, it is typically more focused on the woman than on the idea, and so that presents benefits and challenges that must be navigated as one moves ahead.
Sexual power comes earlier for women, when we are young and full of promise, whereas for men it happens later, once they’ve more solidly proven their worth.
And we project more into women than we do into men, as if on some fundamental level we still understand them as a womb. The experience of this, as a woman receiving it, is something that can be both exhilarating and unnerving, but is ultimately the root of both empathy and the power to seduce; of the sense of violation when we are used and the boundaries we, ultimately, learn to draw.
I don’t expect Carreyrou to understand all this, but I do expect journalists today to do better than to cast women like Elizabeth in dated archetypes and rally others to pull her down like a witch.
When I look at Elizabeth, I see a young entrepreneur with a ton of promise and an idea that was actually revolutionary in a world where most are not. I see a founder with no experience who made some real but common mistakes, not least of which was scaling too soon and getting too much attention too fast. And I see a young woman, thrown into a big and powerful world in which she was trying to figure herself out while charting a path for which there were literally no guides.
None of which is to exonerate her, nor is it to suggest she deserves our pity. It’s not even to say I personally like the sound of her (who still goes to Burning Man?). It’s just to say that I respect what she did, even with the mistakes, and I respect the way she holds her head high now despite all the mud being thrown. That I don’t think she was delusional when she got the sense that she was cut out for something special, she just couldn’t see exactly how. But, in time, I think we’ll recognize that she was a vital part of women’s progress. I just hope that media slander doesn’t deter other promising young minds from pursuing the path she helped make more clear.