More than a decade has passed since Elizabeth Holmes threatened to sue him and attempted to prevent his reporting, and now author John Carrelo has become perhaps an unexpected fan of the new documentary “You Can See Everything”. This film focuses on the family life of the infamous founder of Theranos before he was imprisoned – in fact, he has watched it twice.
Carrero was the author of “Bad Blood” in 2018. The book provides an engaging narrative account of the collapse of “Theranos” and the downfall of Holmes, and it even made it onto the New York Times bestseller list.
In this new documentary, comedian Nathan Field spent 34 days in the guest room of the house where Holmes lived with her partner Billie Evans and their two children, before she was sent to jail. The film brought Holmes, and by extension Carrelu, back into the spotlight, and it also received enthusiastic reviews. It earned an estimated $15 million on its first weekend, becoming the second-highest opening box office for a documentary in history.
Carrelo told The New York Times in a Hard Fork podcast that he watched the movie twice. The first time was at a nearly private screening at the office of A24 Film in Manhattan, attended with his wife. He said that he liked the film even more on his second viewing.
“I think, after watching it twice, I am indeed moved by the cinematographic art of this film, as well as its structure, the extensive meta-thinking that goes into it, and its unusual qualities,” he said in the podcast.
When posting on X, Carrero even went a step further, claiming that this documentary deserves to win for Best Film. However, he warned that the film does not tell the entire story.
"This film is a great work of art, but don't confuse this art with the facts behind it," he said in his statement to Fortune.
Carrero wrote on X that some people told him that Holmes was “unknowable, and everything was very vague.” He said that these people ignored the details he personally experienced during the reporting process, including the legal threats made to him and two of his sources, Taylor Schultz and Erica Zhang, by the lawyer Theranos.
"She exhausted everything she had on Taylor Schultz and Erica Zhang. I was threatened with lawsuits almost every day for months. This is a ruthless cover-up of a shocking fraud, and she is right at the control panel," he wrote in the post.
At the heart of this fraud was Holmes' claim that just a few drops of blood collected from the fingertip using Theranos could enable hundreds of medical tests to be conducted, and that she had packaged this as a more convenient and cheaper way of testing. However, the company's machines were actually capable of performing only a limited number of tests, and often produced unreliable results. Some tests required far more blood than Holmes claimed, or traditional methods had to be used instead of Theranos's product. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Holmes also misled investors by falsely claiming that Theranos had been validated by several large pharmaceutical companies, and told investors that the company would achieve $1 billion in revenue in 2015, when she knew that the actual revenue would be negligible.
Carrelo disclosed more details in the book about the attempts to prevent his reporting, including Holmes’ attempt to directly seek help from Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire owner of The Wall Street Journal, in order to stop his original report. Murdoch is also an investor in Theranos. Lawyers representing Theranos confronted Carrelo in the offices of The Wall Street Journal, and the meeting lasted for about five hours. Carrelo currently works as a journalist at The New York Times.
However, Carrero said that he indeed felt frustrated the first time he watched this movie. In the “Hard Fork” podcast, he stated that when Field repeatedly asked Holmes if she had done anything wrong, and she denied any improper behavior, he “really wanted to rush in, snatch the microphone from Field’s hands, and ask more in-depth questions, without being so polite.”
A source close to Carrero, Taylor Schultz, stated in an interview with CBS that although Holmes denied being at fault, "she knew what she did wrong."
“She wove a whole web of lies; if you really believed those lies, there would be no need to weave such a web at all,” he said.
In 2022, Holmes was convicted of three charges of wire fraud and one charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for deceiving investors. She was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison and was ordered to pay $452 million in damages together with her former boyfriend and business partner, Sunny Balwani. Last year, a federal appeals court upheld her conviction, but in March of this year, a federal judge reduced her sentence to 10 years and 3 months following adjustments to the federal sentencing guidelines. She plans to transfer to a halfway house in 2027 and is expected to be released in 2030.
Despite this experience with Holmes, Carrelo stated that the film ultimately helped to highlight some of Holmes' contradictions. In one scene of the film, Holmes insists that he has never lied in his life, a claim that Carrelo described as "absolutely absurd."
Although some believe this documentary is part of Holmes' attempt to repair her damaged reputation, Carrelo says that her claim of never lying actually has the opposite effect in his view.
“That sounds like an utterly absurd statement that can’t possibly be true,” he said in the podcast, “If there’s any effect at all, it’s that she looks even worse now.”
