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Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Media,
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powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Friday, September 18th, 2026.
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On Sunday night, a photograph went up on Elizabeth Holmes'
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social media account. She is in full makeup, wearing a
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snake ring, blowing a kiss at the camera. The caption said,
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the answer to every challenge lies in your heart. By
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Monday night, it had been seen more than 12 million times.
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Elizabeth Holmes is in a federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas,
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where she has no internet access. The photo is from 2019.
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The account is being run by her partner. And when
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somebody on that platform asked the account where she was,
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it answered, Bryan Federal Prison Camp. That is not an accident,
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and it is not a joke. That is a campaign,
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and it has three parts. There is a three-hour documentary
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coming out next month that nobody knew existed until two
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weeks ago. There is a social media presence that has
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come back to life after 10 years of silence. And
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there is a petition sitting at the Justice Department asking
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the President of the United States to let her out.
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So today, we are doing the whole thing. What she did.
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What a jury convicted her of. what that same jury
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refused to convict her of, which is the part almost
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everybody gets wrong, and whether any of this works. Let's
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get into it. On September 6th, at the Telluride Film
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Festival in Colorado, an audience filed into the Herzog Theater
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for a screening with no announced title. Their phones were
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taken and locked in pouches at the door. Then the
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lights went down, and they found out they were watching
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a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. It is called You Can
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See Everything. It runs nearly three hours. It was directed
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by Nathan Fielder, the comedian behind the rehearsal, and Nathan
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For You, together with the filmmaker Lance Oppenheim. And here
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is how it happened, which is the strangest part. In 2023,
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34 days before Elizabeth Holmes was due to report to
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federal prison, she and her partner Billy Evans invited a
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film crew into the San Diego house they were renting.
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Not a crew they hired. a skeptical crew with a
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comedian who does not do sympathetic portraits. The approach came
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from her side. Oppenheim heard that Holmes and Evans had
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gone looking for someone to document their story. He told
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Fielder about it, and Fielder took the meeting. The terms,
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according to Holmes, were that they could see everything, hence
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the title. And then it kept going for three years,
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through her incarceration, through the rejection of her appeal, through
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all of it. Reviews out of Telluride have been extraordinary.
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One critic wrote that it overlaps reality, performance, deception, and
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mental illness until it brings you into the space where
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all of those things meet. Another said they could not
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imagine wanting to hear another second about Elizabeth Holmes and
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left the theater proven wrong. In the trailer, Fielder and
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Holmes sit facing each other and stare at each other
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for about a minute while he asks whether she is
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being genuine. she tells him she does not have anything
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to deceive him on. That, of course, she is not
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deceiving him. That she is engaging with him as a
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human being, and there is no reason for her to
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do that. He says, okay, good chat. You're being real
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right now? And she says, I'm always being real. Now,
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there is a detail in the reporting about this film
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that I want to flag, because it is journalistically significant,
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and it has been mostly buried. Portions of the documentary
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in which Fielder communicates with Holmes off-camera, including from inside
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the prison in Texas, are recreated. With an actress. An
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A-list actress, according to NBC. So a documentary about a
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woman convicted of deception, which is explicitly about whether you
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can tell when she is telling the truth, contains sequences
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in which a performer plays her. I am not criticizing
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the filmmakers for that. Federal prisons do not let camera
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crews in, and recreation is a legitimate documentary technique when
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it is disclosed, and by all accounts it is disclosed.
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Fielder has spent his entire career on the scene between
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documentary and performance, and he knows exactly what he is doing.
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But it tells you what everybody involved is grappling with.
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Fielder said at Telluride that he still does not understand
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why she wanted him there, that it messed with his head,
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and that what he is most excited about is for
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audiences to watch it and tell him what he experienced.
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That is a director saying out loud that he spent
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three years with this woman and does not know what
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he saw. And then there is the account. Elizabeth Holmes'
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social media account went quiet in 2015, back when she
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was posting about Rosa Parks and Marie Curie and Melinda Gates.
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It came back to life in August of last year.
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According to NPR, it is being run by Billy Evans.
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It has been posting political content. And this week, it
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posted the glamour photograph, and then it started replying to people.
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Told her snake ring was interesting, it said the ring
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came from a Taylor Swift merchandise stand. Told by someone
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that she has not changed at all, it replied, true,
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but I don't think that's the insult you meant it
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to be. and asked where she is, it answered with
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the name of the federal prison camp. That is a
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very particular kind of media strategy. It is self-aware, it
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is unbothered, it is a little funny, and it is
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being executed on behalf of a woman serving 11 years
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for fraud by the father of her two children, while
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a clemency petition sits in Washington. Whether you find that
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admirable or obscene probably depends on whether you lost money
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or got a blood test. And I want to be
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fair about one thing before we go further, because it
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is easy to be glib about this. There is no
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rule against a person in federal custody having a documentary
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made about them, and there is no rule against a
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family member running a social media account. Billy Evans is
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the father of two small children whose mother is in
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Texas until the 2030s. If he wants to spend his
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evenings arguing with strangers on the internet on her behalf,
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that is not a crime, and it is not even unusual.
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What makes it worth a segment is the timing. All
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three pieces of this, the film, the account, and the petition,
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are running at once. And the only one with any
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legal consequence is the one nobody is talking about. When
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we come back, what a jury actually convicted her of,
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and the four counts it refused to. Here is the
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part of this story that gets told wrong constantly, including
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by people who should know better. Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos
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in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford at 19. The
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pitch was that the company could run hundreds of blood
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tests from a single finger prick using a machine called
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the Edison. It raised nearly a billion dollars. She was
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on the cover of magazines. At one point, she was
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described as the youngest self-made female billionaire in America. The
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technology did not work. A series of investigations by a
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Wall Street Journal reporter and by regulators brought it down
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starting in 2015. She was indicted. Her trial ran from
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August of 2021 to January of 2022. She testified in
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her own defense for about seven days. She told the
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jury she genuinely believed in the technology. She also testified
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that she had been in an abusive relationship with Ramesh Balwani,
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her former partner, and the company's president, and that it
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affected her judgment. That allegation is why their trials were separated.
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On January 3rd, 2022, the jury came back with a
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split verdict, and this is the part that matters. She
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was convicted on four counts, one count of conspiracy to
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defraud investors, and three counts of wire fraud against individual investors.
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Those wire transfers totaled more than $ 140 million. She was
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acquitted on four counts, one count of conspiracy to defraud patients,
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and three counts of fraud against individual patients. A fourth
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patient-related count had already been dismissed during the trial, and
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the jury hung on three more investor counts, so the
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judge declared a mistrial on those. Elizabeth Holmes is not
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in prison for what Theranos did to patients. She was
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tried for that, and a jury found her not guilty
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of it. The prosecution could not prove beyond a reasonable
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doubt that she intended to deceive the people who walked
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into a Walgreens and rolled up a sleeve. Jurors distinguished
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between what she did to sophisticated investors who had lawyers
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and analysts and every opportunity to check and what happened
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to patients who had none of that. And people did
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get hurt. At trial, patients testified about receiving erroneous results
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from Theranos tests, including results that falsely indicated serious disease,
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and results that a woman was told meant she was
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losing a pregnancy. Nobody has ever been convicted of a
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crime for that. Well, almost nobody. Because Ramesh Balwani was
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tried separately on an identical indictment, and his jury convicted
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him on all 12 counts. Investor fraud and patient fraud both.
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He is serving 155 months, close to 13 years, in
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a federal prison in California. His sentence is longer than hers.
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Two juries. The same company, the same scheme. One of
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them found the patient charges proven and one of them
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did not. I am not saying her jury got it wrong.
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I was not in that room and neither were you.
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And the burden of proof is supposed to be difficult.
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That is the whole point of it. What I am
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saying is that if you have absorbed a general sense
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that Elizabeth Holmes is in prison, because sick people got
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bad blood tests. That is not what happened. She is
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in prison because Rupert Murdoch and the DeVos family and
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the Walton family and a pharmacy chain and a grocery
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chain gave her money based on things that were not true.
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In November of 2022, Judge Edward Davila sentenced her to
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135 months, 11 years and three months, plus three years
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of supervised release. In May of 2023, after a separate hearing,
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the court ordered her and Balwani jointly and severally liable
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for $ 452, 047, 000 in restitution to investors. Not $ 1 of that
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goes to a patient. There was no patient conviction to
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base it on. That number is going to follow her
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for the rest of her life. Restitution is not discharged
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by serving a sentence, and it is extraordinarily difficult to
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discharge in bankruptcy. Whatever she earns, for as long as
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she earns it, a portion is owed against $ 452 million.
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And one more thing about that restitution list, because it
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is worth hearing who is on it. The $ 452 million
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is owed to investors. Reporting on the order has described
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the recipients as including roughly $ 125 million to the media
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executive Rupert Murdoch, along with amounts to the DeVos family,
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the Walton family, and the corporate investors Walgreens and Safeway.
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I want to be careful here because those people were
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genuinely defrauded and being rich does not stop that from
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being a crime. Fraud is fraud whether the victim is
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a billionaire or a pensioner and a system that only
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prosecutes the theft of poor people's money would be worse
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than the one we have. But it is worth saying
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plainly what this case is because the mythology has gotten
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away from it. The largest Silicon Valley fraud prosecution of
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the last 20 years was, legally speaking, about a group
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of extremely wealthy people and two large corporations who did
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not do their homework and who got their money back
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through a court order. She reported to the federal prison
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camp in Bryan, Texas in May of 2023. When we
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come back, the appeal is finished and there is exactly
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one road left. In February of 2025, a three-judge panel
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of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed everything. The convictions,
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the sentences, the $ 452 million restitution order, all of it
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for both Holmes and Balwani in a 54-page opinion. Her
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lawyers had argued that testimony from former Theranos lab directors
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about whether the technology worked amounted to improper expert opinion.
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The panel agreed some of that testimony veered into expert territory,
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and then said it did not matter because other employees
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established the same thing. They challenged the restitution calculation, arguing
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the number should not have been the investor's total investments
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because Theranos still had some intrinsic value. The panel rejected
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that too, finding the victims' actual losses were equal to
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the total amount they put in. That was the appeal.
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It is over. Which leaves two roads, and one of
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them is theoretical. The theoretical one is the Supreme Court.
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Experts consider it unlikely and for good reason. The court
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takes a tiny fraction of the petitions it receives, and
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it takes them to resolve splits between circuits or to
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settle constitutional questions, not to re-examine whether one fraud trial
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was run correctly. The real road is clemency, and it
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is worth understanding what that power actually is, because it
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is one of the least constrained things in American government.
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The pardon power comes from Article 2 of the Constitution.
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For federal offenses, it is essentially unreviewable. There is no
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appeal from a pardon and no appeal from a refusal
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to grant one. No court can order it, and no
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court can undo it. The Office of the Pardon Attorney
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at the Justice Department reviews petitions and makes recommendations, and
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a president is free to ignore every one of them.
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It exists because the framers understood that law applied perfectly
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can still produce injustice, and that somebody has to be
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able to say, enough. It is also, for exactly the
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same reason, the single easiest lever in the federal system
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for a well-connected person to reach. According to the Justice
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Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney, Elizabeth Holmes filed for
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a commutation of her sentence at some point in 2025.
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Her request is listed on the department's own website as pending.
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A commutation is not a pardon. A pardon says the
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conviction should not have stuck. A commutation says the conviction
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stands and the punishment ends early. She is not asking
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to be declared innocent. She is asking to go home.
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And her strategy, whatever you think of it, is not irrational.