sources, as did several other former employees.
While Tyler Shultz remained unreachable (I’d gotten his mother on
the phone and left a message for him with her, to no avail), I assumed
Theranos would have presented us with a signed statement similar to
the ones from Drs. Rezaie and Beardsley if it had succeeded in making
him recant. Besides, there was nothing it could do to make the emails
he had given me disappear. Those spoke for themselves.
In a last-ditch effort to prevent publication, Boies sent the Journal a
third lengthy letter, reiterating his threat to sue the paper and
dismissing my reporting as an elaborate fantasy concocted by a fertile
mind:
I have tried to figure out how we could have arrived at a
place where The Journal is considering publication of an
article that we know to be false, misleading, and unfair,
and that threatens to disclose information that Theranos
rigorously protects as trade secrets.
The root of the problem may be the drama of the
reporter’s original thesis, which may fall into the category
of “too good to check.” That thesis, as Mr. Carreyrou
explained in discussions with us, is that all of the
recognition by the academic, scientific, and health-care
communities of the breakthrough contributions of
Theranos’ achievements is wrong; that every previous
published report about Theranos, including in The Journal
itself, has been the result of misleading manipulation by
the company; and that the company and its founder are
essentially perpetrating a fraud by touting a technology
that does not work and using existing commercial
equipment to do tests that Theranos pretends are done
with new technology. Certainly such an exposé, if true,
would be a powerful piece of investigative journalism. The
problem may be that even though that thesis is not true, it
is just too dramatic to let go.