The letter requested an audience with Gerry Baker, the Journal’s
editor in chief. For the sake of fairness, Baker granted him one but
made sure to invite me and Mike to attend as well as Jay Conti and
Neal Lipschutz, the paper’s standards editor.
At 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, we met with Boies again in a
different conference room on the sixth floor of the Journal’s
newsroom. This time, he came with a smaller contingent made up of
Heather King and Meredith Dearborn. As she had in June, King pulled
out a little tape recorder and set it on the table between us.
Although they continued to argue strenuously that my reporting was
flawed and inaccurate, Boies and King made two key admissions
during this second meeting that strengthened our hand.
Acknowledging for the first time that Theranos didn’t run all of its
blood tests on its proprietary devices, Boies described the transition to
doing so as “a journey” that would take the company some time to
complete. The second came after I brought up several recent wording
changes I’d noticed on the Theranos website. One in particular seemed
telling: the sentence “Many of our tests require only a few drops of
blood” had been deleted. When I asked why, King inadvertently
blurted out that she assumed it was for “marketing accuracy.” (Later,
she would insist she never pronounced those words.)
Toward the end of the meeting, Boies tried one last tack: if we were
willing to delay going to press a little longer, he would arrange a
demonstration of the Theranos device. They had done one for Fortune
magazine not long before, he said, so there was no reason they
couldn’t do one for us too. Such a demonstration would provide the
incontrovertible proof that we were wrong about the machine not
working, Boies contended.
Mike and I asked how soon it could take place, which tests would be
administered, and what assurance we would have that the results
would come from the device and not involve some sleight of hand.
When Boies replied that it would probably take several weeks to
organize and was wishy-washy on the other points, Baker politely
declined the offer. He shared our view that we had to publish before
Holmes’s appearance at the Journal’s tech conference, which was less