attendance chanted: “Fuck you, Carrey-rou! Fuck you, Carrey-rou!”
—
WHEN HOLMES HAD SAID she planned to take the fight to the Journal,
she meant it.
Many people had assumed she would back out of the paper’s WSJ
D.Live conference the following week. But on the appointed day and at
the appointed time, she appeared at the beachfront Montage hotel and
resort in Laguna Beach with her platoon of guards and joined
Jonathan Krim, the Journal’s technology editor, onstage. The
audience of more than one hundred—a mixture of venture capitalists,
startup founders, bankers, and public-relations executives who had
paid five thousand dollars each to attend the three-day conference—
buzzed in anticipation.
Mike Siconolfi had wanted me to handle the interview, but the paper
didn’t like the idea of making last-minute changes to an event that had
taken months of planning. Besides, I couldn’t leave New York. My wife
was stuck on jury duty in a federal trial in Islip, Long Island, a two-
hour drive from Brooklyn. I had to take care of our kids.
There was so much interest in the unfolding Theranos story that the
Journal had decided to stream the interview live on its website.
Several of us watched it in Neal Lipschutz’s office.
Holmes came out swinging almost from the start. That was no
surprise: we had expected her to be combative. What we hadn’t fully
anticipated was her willingness to tell bald-face lies in a public forum.
Not just once, but again and again during the half-hour interview. In
addition to continuing to insist that the nanotainer withdrawal had
been voluntary, she said the Edison devices referred to in my stories
were an old technology that Theranos hadn’t used in years. She also
denied that the company had ever used commercial lab equipment for
finger-stick tests. And she claimed that the way Theranos conducted
proficiency testing was not only perfectly legal, it had the express
blessing of regulators.
The biggest lie, to my mind, was her categorical denial that