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NY Times Publishes Human-Interest Feature About Infamous Fraudster

Posted on | May 9, 2023 | 1 Comment

You remember Elizabeth Holmes, right? A Stanford University dropout, she raised $700 million in startup capital for a medical testing company, Theranos, and by 2014, when the company’s value had soared to $9 billion, Forbes magazine “recognized Holmes as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.” It was all a scam.

The scam involved a blood-testing machine, called “Edison,” that was supposed to revolutionize medical testing. In fact, Theranos was actually using equipment from other manufacturers to run blood tests. Holmes was widely celebrated as the face of “women in tech,” but her scam was exposed by the Wall Street Journal in 2015. She was indicted on federal fraud charges in 2018 and last year was sentenced to 11 years in prison. She is currently free pending appeal, and the New York Times did a feature story about her Sunday that pissed off nearly everybody. It’s easy to see why people are angry, with passages like this:

Ms. Holmes’s defenders, stretching back to childhood, said in letters to the court, and in conversations with me, that the feverish coverage of Ms. Holmes’s downfall felt like a witch trial, less rooted in what actually happened at Theranos, and more of a message to ambitious women everywhere. Don’t girl boss too close to the sun, or this could happen to you …
“There’s an unspoken lesson for female executives: you’re allowed to be successful but not too successful,” Jackie Lamping, a Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sister of Ms. Holmes at Stanford, wrote in a letter to Judge Davila, who oversaw the trial.
Ms. Holmes said she believed that making herself the poster girl for women in tech put a huge target on her back. . . .

Elizabeth Holmes was not “successful” in anything, except in scamming investors, which is why she’s going to prison. She’s a female Bernie Madoff, and if it weren’t for her status as the erstwhile “poster girl for women in tech,” nobody would be trying to gin up sympathy for her, least of all the New York Times. The chief science officer at Theranos, Ian Gibbons, committed suicide; his widow blames Holmes. But please, tell me again how Holmes is the real victim here.



 

 

Category: New York Times

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One Response to “NY Times Publishes Human-Interest Feature About Infamous Fraudster”

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