Elizabeth Holmes Has a Secret A24 Documentary, a Revived Account, and a Clemency Petition Sitting at the Justice Department

0:10 Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Friday, September 18th, 2026. On Sunday night, a photograph went up on Elizabeth Holmes' social media account. She is in full makeup, wearing a snake ring, blowing a kiss at the camera. The caption said, the answer to every challenge lies in your heart. By Monday night, it had been seen more than 12 million times. Elizabeth Holmes is in a federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, where she has no internet access. The photo is from 2019. The account is being run by her partner. And when somebody on that platform asked the account where she was, it answered, Bryan Federal Prison Camp. That is not an accident, and it is not a joke. That is a campaign, and it has three parts. There is a three-hour documentary coming out next month that nobody knew existed until two weeks ago. There is a social media presence that has come back to life after 10 years of silence. And there is a petition sitting at the Justice Department asking the President of the United States to let her out.

1:21 So today, we are doing the whole thing. What she did. What a jury convicted her of. what that same jury refused to convict her of, which is the part almost everybody gets wrong, and whether any of this works. Let's get into it. On September 6th, at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, an audience filed into the Herzog Theater for a screening with no announced title. Their phones were taken and locked in pouches at the door. Then the lights went down, and they found out they were watching a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. It is called You Can See Everything. It runs nearly three hours. It was directed by Nathan Fielder, the comedian behind the rehearsal, and Nathan For You, together with the filmmaker Lance Oppenheim. And here is how it happened, which is the strangest part. In 2023, 34 days before Elizabeth Holmes was due to report to federal prison, she and her partner Billy Evans invited a film crew into the San Diego house they were renting.

2:24 Not a crew they hired. a skeptical crew with a comedian who does not do sympathetic portraits. The approach came from her side. Oppenheim heard that Holmes and Evans had gone looking for someone to document their story. He told Fielder about it, and Fielder took the meeting. The terms, according to Holmes, were that they could see everything, hence the title. And then it kept going for three years, through her incarceration, through the rejection of her appeal, through all of it. Reviews out of Telluride have been extraordinary. One critic wrote that it overlaps reality, performance, deception, and mental illness until it brings you into the space where all of those things meet. Another said they could not imagine wanting to hear another second about Elizabeth Holmes and left the theater proven wrong. In the trailer, Fielder and Holmes sit facing each other and stare at each other for about a minute while he asks whether she is being genuine. she tells him she does not have anything to deceive him on. That, of course, she is not deceiving him. That she is engaging with him as a human being, and there is no reason for her to do that. He says, okay, good chat. You're being real right now? And she says, I'm always being real. Now, there is a detail in the reporting about this film that I want to flag, because it is journalistically significant, and it has been mostly buried. Portions of the documentary in which Fielder communicates with Holmes off-camera, including from inside

3:55 the prison in Texas, are recreated. With an actress. An A-list actress, according to NBC. So a documentary about a woman convicted of deception, which is explicitly about whether you can tell when she is telling the truth, contains sequences in which a performer plays her. I am not criticizing the filmmakers for that. Federal prisons do not let camera crews in, and recreation is a legitimate documentary technique when it is disclosed, and by all accounts it is disclosed. Fielder has spent his entire career on the scene between documentary and performance, and he knows exactly what he is doing.

4:35 But it tells you what everybody involved is grappling with. Fielder said at Telluride that he still does not understand why she wanted him there, that it messed with his head, and that what he is most excited about is for audiences to watch it and tell him what he experienced. That is a director saying out loud that he spent three years with this woman and does not know what he saw. And then there is the account. Elizabeth Holmes' social media account went quiet in 2015, back when she was posting about Rosa Parks and Marie Curie and Melinda Gates. It came back to life in August of last year. According to NPR, it is being run by Billy Evans. It has been posting political content. And this week, it posted the glamour photograph, and then it started replying to people.

5:22 Told her snake ring was interesting, it said the ring came from a Taylor Swift merchandise stand. Told by someone that she has not changed at all, it replied, true, but I don't think that's the insult you meant it to be. and asked where she is, it answered with the name of the federal prison camp. That is a very particular kind of media strategy. It is self-aware, it is unbothered, it is a little funny, and it is being executed on behalf of a woman serving 11 years for fraud by the father of her two children, while a clemency petition sits in Washington. Whether you find that admirable or obscene probably depends on whether you lost money or got a blood test. And I want to be fair about one thing before we go further, because it is easy to be glib about this. There is no rule against a person in federal custody having a documentary made about them, and there is no rule against a family member running a social media account. Billy Evans is the father of two small children whose mother is in Texas until the 2030s. If he wants to spend his evenings arguing with strangers on the internet on her behalf, that is not a crime, and it is not even unusual.

6:31 What makes it worth a segment is the timing. All three pieces of this, the film, the account, and the petition, are running at once. And the only one with any legal consequence is the one nobody is talking about. When we come back, what a jury actually convicted her of, and the four counts it refused to. Here is the part of this story that gets told wrong constantly, including by people who should know better. Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford at 19. The pitch was that the company could run hundreds of blood tests from a single finger prick using a machine called the Edison. It raised nearly a billion dollars. She was on the cover of magazines. At one point, she was described as the youngest self-made female billionaire in America. The technology did not work. A series of investigations by a Wall Street Journal reporter and by regulators brought it down starting in 2015. She was indicted. Her trial ran from August of 2021 to January of 2022. She testified in her own defense for about seven days. She told the jury she genuinely believed in the technology. She also testified that she had been in an abusive relationship with Ramesh Balwani,

8:01 her former partner, and the company's president, and that it affected her judgment. That allegation is why their trials were separated. On January 3rd, 2022, the jury came back with a split verdict, and this is the part that matters. She was convicted on four counts, one count of conspiracy to defraud investors, and three counts of wire fraud against individual investors. Those wire transfers totaled more than $ 140 million. She was acquitted on four counts, one count of conspiracy to defraud patients, and three counts of fraud against individual patients. A fourth patient-related count had already been dismissed during the trial, and the jury hung on three more investor counts, so the judge declared a mistrial on those. Elizabeth Holmes is not in prison for what Theranos did to patients. She was tried for that, and a jury found her not guilty of it. The prosecution could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she intended to deceive the people who walked into a Walgreens and rolled up a sleeve. Jurors distinguished between what she did to sophisticated investors who had lawyers and analysts and every opportunity to check and what happened to patients who had none of that. And people did get hurt. At trial, patients testified about receiving erroneous results from Theranos tests, including results that falsely indicated serious disease, and results that a woman was told meant she was losing a pregnancy. Nobody has ever been convicted of a crime for that. Well, almost nobody. Because Ramesh Balwani was

9:36 tried separately on an identical indictment, and his jury convicted him on all 12 counts. Investor fraud and patient fraud both. He is serving 155 months, close to 13 years, in a federal prison in California. His sentence is longer than hers. Two juries. The same company, the same scheme. One of them found the patient charges proven and one of them did not. I am not saying her jury got it wrong. I was not in that room and neither were you. And the burden of proof is supposed to be difficult. That is the whole point of it. What I am saying is that if you have absorbed a general sense that Elizabeth Holmes is in prison, because sick people got bad blood tests. That is not what happened. She is in prison because Rupert Murdoch and the DeVos family and the Walton family and a pharmacy chain and a grocery chain gave her money based on things that were not true.

10:34 In November of 2022, Judge Edward Davila sentenced her to 135 months, 11 years and three months, plus three years of supervised release. In May of 2023, after a separate hearing, the court ordered her and Balwani jointly and severally liable for $ 452, 047, 000 in restitution to investors. Not $ 1 of that goes to a patient. There was no patient conviction to base it on. That number is going to follow her for the rest of her life. Restitution is not discharged by serving a sentence, and it is extraordinarily difficult to discharge in bankruptcy. Whatever she earns, for as long as she earns it, a portion is owed against $ 452 million.

11:20 And one more thing about that restitution list, because it is worth hearing who is on it. The $ 452 million is owed to investors. Reporting on the order has described the recipients as including roughly $ 125 million to the media executive Rupert Murdoch, along with amounts to the DeVos family, the Walton family, and the corporate investors Walgreens and Safeway. I want to be careful here because those people were genuinely defrauded and being rich does not stop that from being a crime. Fraud is fraud whether the victim is a billionaire or a pensioner and a system that only prosecutes the theft of poor people's money would be worse than the one we have. But it is worth saying plainly what this case is because the mythology has gotten away from it. The largest Silicon Valley fraud prosecution of the last 20 years was, legally speaking, about a group of extremely wealthy people and two large corporations who did not do their homework and who got their money back through a court order. She reported to the federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas in May of 2023. When we come back, the appeal is finished and there is exactly one road left. In February of 2025, a three-judge panel

12:51 of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed everything. The convictions, the sentences, the $ 452 million restitution order, all of it for both Holmes and Balwani in a 54-page opinion. Her lawyers had argued that testimony from former Theranos lab directors about whether the technology worked amounted to improper expert opinion. The panel agreed some of that testimony veered into expert territory, and then said it did not matter because other employees established the same thing. They challenged the restitution calculation, arguing the number should not have been the investor's total investments because Theranos still had some intrinsic value. The panel rejected that too, finding the victims' actual losses were equal to the total amount they put in. That was the appeal.

13:40 It is over. Which leaves two roads, and one of them is theoretical. The theoretical one is the Supreme Court. Experts consider it unlikely and for good reason. The court takes a tiny fraction of the petitions it receives, and it takes them to resolve splits between circuits or to settle constitutional questions, not to re-examine whether one fraud trial was run correctly. The real road is clemency, and it is worth understanding what that power actually is, because it is one of the least constrained things in American government. The pardon power comes from Article 2 of the Constitution. For federal offenses, it is essentially unreviewable. There is no appeal from a pardon and no appeal from a refusal to grant one. No court can order it, and no court can undo it. The Office of the Pardon Attorney at the Justice Department reviews petitions and makes recommendations, and a president is free to ignore every one of them.

14:37 It exists because the framers understood that law applied perfectly can still produce injustice, and that somebody has to be able to say, enough. It is also, for exactly the same reason, the single easiest lever in the federal system for a well-connected person to reach. According to the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney, Elizabeth Holmes filed for a commutation of her sentence at some point in 2025. Her request is listed on the department's own website as pending. A commutation is not a pardon. A pardon says the conviction should not have stuck. A commutation says the conviction stands and the punishment ends early. She is not asking to be declared innocent. She is asking to go home.

15:21 And her strategy, whatever you think of it, is not irrational. The Justice Department's website lists 114 people granted clemency by the president since the start of his second term. Of those, 34 were convicted of fraud. 34 out of 114. Just under a third of all clemency granted has gone to people convicted of financial crimes. So here is the picture. A woman with no remaining appeal, serving 11 years for investor fraud, is promoting a documentary from prison, running a revived social media account through her partner, posting content aligned with the administration's health politics, and waiting on a commutation petition in a period when roughly a third of clemency grants have gone to fraud convictions. That's not a mistake.

16:06 That's a choice, and it is a very well-designed one. Now let me tell you what I actually think, because I have been going back and forth on this all week. I do not believe Elizabeth Holmes should be pardoned. Not because 11 years is too short, and not out of any appetite for watching somebody suffer. She has two young children who did not do anything, and there is no version of this where their mother being in Texas until 2031 makes the world better for them. I believe it because of what a commutation would say about what this country punishes. There are people in federal prison right now serving comparable sentences for drug conspiracies involving a fraction of the money, who did not go to Stanford, who cannot get a comedian to make a three-hour film about them, and whose partners are not running a social media campaign on their behalf. Their clemency petitions are in the same pile.

16:57 They will not be granted. If access to A24 and a national audience is what moves a petition to the top of the stack, then clemency is not mercy. It is just another market, and the people who were always good at markets will win it. And I will say the other thing too. If this film is as good as Telluride says, I am going to watch it. I am the audience for that. So was everybody who made the Theranos podcast and the HBO documentary and the Hulu series, and so is everybody listening to this show right now, including me making it. We built the machine that turns a fraud conviction into a franchise. She is just the first one to figure out how to drive it from inside a prison camp. One more thing and then we are done. In all the coverage this week, in all 12 million views of that photograph, in the reviews and the trailer and the staring contest, I have not seen a single name of a single person who got a wrong blood test result. Those people testified. A jury heard them and acquitted her, which was the jury's right and may well have been correct on the evidence. But they existed.

18:03 They are still out there. Some of them spent a period of their lives believing they had a disease they did not have, or that they had lost a pregnancy they had not lost. Nobody is making a three-hour film about them, and nobody ever will. And here is the thing that will keep bothering me after this episode is over. If Elizabeth Holmes walks out of Bryan in the next year, the reason will not be that a court looked again at the evidence. Her appeal is finished. The Ninth Circuit read 54 pages worth of her arguments and rejected all of them. It will be because a documentary was good and a social media account was clever and the right person watched. That is not justice being corrected. That is justice being marketed to. Someone has to say that they were real. That's the show for Friday, September 18th. If you're on Apple, there is a button at the top of your screen that says listen uninterrupted. $ 5 a month, no ads, and it covers thousands of shows across Calaroga Media.

19:07 Not just this one. 30 days free if you want to try it first. Everybody who has already done it, thank you. You are the reason this show exists. And on Spotify, leave a comment on this one because I want to argue about it. Should a president be able to commute the sentence of somebody who runs a successful publicity campaign from prison? Or is clemency exactly the place where the system is supposed to be able to change its mind? Coming up, Matthew Exton is sentenced Monday in Toledo and he is facing up to 25 years. We are still in Largo, where a surgeon is defending himself in a death penalty case with no lawyer and no jury. And a week from Tuesday, Lindsay Clancy is back in front of Judge Sullivan, when Plymouth County should finally say whether it is trying that case again. I'm Garrett Fisher.

19:53 Do better. A few notes on sourcing. Elizabeth Holmes was convicted in January of 2022 on one count of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud against investors. She was acquitted of all patient-related fraud counts, and the jury hung on three additional investor counts. Ramesh Balwani was convicted on all 12 counts of an identical indictment in a separate trial. Both convictions, sentences, and the restitution order were affirmed by the Ninth Circuit in February of 2025. Reporting has varied on her projected release date and on whether her term has been adjusted since sentencing. Federal sentences are routinely shortened by Good Conduct Time and First Step Act credits, and the Bureau of Prisons has listed different dates at different points. We have described the sentence imposed rather than predicting a release date. Our description of the documentary comes from reporting on its Telluride premiere and from the distributor's announcements. Neither we nor most of the people writing about it have seen the finished film, which is scheduled for theatrical release on October 16th. Accounts have differed slightly on how many days before her incarceration filming began.

21:07 The social media account attributed to Elizabeth Holmes is reported to be operated by her partner, Billy Evans, and she does not have internet access in federal custody. We have not treated posts from that account as direct statements by her. The clemency petition is listed as pending by the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney. A pending petition is not an indication of any outcome. The figures on clemency grants come from the Justice Department's published list. Our description of patient testimony reflects evidence presented at trial. Because Holmes was acquitted on all patient-related counts, no court has found her criminally responsible for any harm to a patient, and nothing in this episode should be understood to suggest otherwise.