A whistleblower takes aim at the film
Tyler Shultz, a former research engineer at Theranos, has published an essay arguing that the new film about Elizabeth Holmes leaves out context a viewer needs. He wrote the piece for Stat News, and it appeared on Monday. Shultz is one of the people who raised alarms about the company's blood-testing technology, which he says was not the breakthrough medical product Holmes presented it as.[S1]
Shultz's connection to Theranos ran through his family. His grandfather, former Secretary of State George Shultz, served on the company's board and helped him land an internship at the diagnostics startup. That internship turned into a full-time research engineering job, and within eight months he concluded that something was seriously wrong. He later appeared in the HBO film The Inventor and was depicted in the dramatized series The Dropout.[S1]
In the essay, Shultz describes having watched Holmes operate across a three-hour film and across most of his adult life. He notes that he met her at 20 and that she went to prison when he was 32, and that she had attended his family holidays and birthday parties because of her board role. He also says he wishes he could have warned director Nathan Fielder not to underestimate her, the same caution he gave reporter John Carreyrou when the latter began investigating.[S1]
The device on the kitchen table
Shultz singles out the scene in which Holmes shows Fielder a blood-testing device, saying the sight nearly drove him out of his theater seat. He maintains that the machine on the kitchen table was not the one he worked with for long shifts, not the one the company concealed from regulators, not the one that repeatedly failed quality controls and not the one used to give patients inaccurate results. In his account, it was an unfinished future version of the product that never saw use.[S1]
His interpretation is that Holmes displayed that unreleased model to steer Fielder toward a technical argument that missed the point. He argues the device she presented was not the reason she went to prison, and that the choice of hardware pulled the conversation into a dispute over semantics rather than the conduct that led to her conviction.[S1]
Setting, backstory and the documentary label
The essay likewise casts doubt on the unassuming two-bedroom condo used as a filming location. Shultz notes that Holmes had lately been sharing a home with her partner Billy Evans, whose family runs a high-end resort in San Diego, at an estate valued at $125 million. He also brings up the mistreatment Holmes endured from ex-boyfriend Ramesh Balwani, Theranos's chief operating officer and a fellow fraud convict, saying she knew of his abusive streak and regarded him as a convenient scapegoat had the company failed.[S1]
Shultz allows that the film works as entertainment but maintains it is no documentary, and he warns that marketing it as one is risky. Glenn Whipp, a Los Angeles Times columnist, observed that viewers come away wondering about Holmes, about how easily truth can bend and about whether any documentary can truly be objective. Billed as a documentary, the project earned $15 million across the weekend, the genre's second-strongest debut.[S1]
Coverage of the whistleblower's reaction circulated widely, with outlets reporting his verdict on the film and his claim that its makers were misled.[S2][S3][S4][S5][S6][S7][S8]
