Bad Blood

(Axel Boer) #1

was no longer in the know at that stage. King interjected, dismissing
Gibbons as an alcoholic. Boies, meanwhile, attacked Rochelle
Gibbons’s credibility by pointing out that she had failed to provide a
sworn declaration in the Fuisz case, leading the judge to rule against
allowing her testimony at trial.


Whether she’d provided a sworn statement in the Fuisz case or not
was beside the point, I told him. I found her credible as a source and
she was speaking to me on the record.


“She’s under oath with me,” I said.
We eventually turned to the instances of questionable test results I
had gathered during my reporting. To be able to respond to my
specific patient examples, King said Theranos would need to obtain
signed releases from each waiving his or her patient-privacy rights.
She asked me to help gather the waivers from the patients. I agreed to
do so.


By the time the meeting finally broke up, it was nearly six p.m. and
King looked like she wanted to plant a dagger in my chest.



THREE DAYS LATER, Erika Cheung was working late in the lab at her
new employer, a biotech firm called Antibody Solutions, when a
colleague came over to tell her that a man was asking to see her. The
man had been waiting in his car in the parking lot for a long time, the
colleague said.


Erika was immediately on her guard. Mona Ramamurthy, the head
of human resources at Theranos, had left several messages on her cell-
phone voicemail earlier in the day saying there was something urgent
she needed to discuss with her. Erika hadn’t returned her calls and
now some mysterious man was outside waiting to talk to her. She
suspected the two were connected.


It was six p.m. on a Friday and not many people were left at
Antibody Solutions’ Sunnyvale offices. To be safe, Erika asked her
colleague to walk her to her car. As they exited the building, a young
man stepped out of an SUV and walked toward them at a fast clip with

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