and that Safeway had walked away from their previously undisclosed
partnership over concerns about its testing. With each new story came
a new retraction demand from Heather King.
In a windowless war room set up on the second floor of the Page
Mill Road building in Palo Alto, Holmes and her communications
consultants discussed strategies for how to hit back against my
reporting. One approach she favored was to portray me as a
misogynist. To generate further sympathy, she suggested she reveal
publicly that she had been sexually assaulted as a student at Stanford.
Her advisers counseled against going that route, but she didn’t
abandon it entirely. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek,
she suggested she was the victim of sexism.
“Until what happened in the last four weeks, I didn’t understand
what it means to be a woman in this space,” she told the magazine.
“Every article starting with, ‘A young woman.’ Right? Someone came
up to me the other day, and they were like, ‘I have never read an article
about Mark Zuckerberg that starts with ‘A young man.’ ”
In the same story, her old Stanford professor, Channing Robertson,
dismissed questions about the accuracy of Theranos’s testing as
absurd, saying the company would have to be “certifiable” to go to
market with a product that people’s lives depended on knowing that it
was unreliable. He also maintained that Holmes was a once-in-a-
generation genius, comparing her to Newton, Einstein, Mozart, and
Leonardo da Vinci.
Holmes, too, continued to embrace an exalted image of herself. In
her acceptance speech at Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year
Awards at Carnegie Hall, she held herself up as a role model for young
women. “Do everything you can to be the best in science and math and
engineering,” she urged them. “It’s that that our little girls will see
when they start to think about who do they want to be when they grow
up.”
There was only one way the charade would end and that was if CMS,
the chief regulator of clinical laboratories, took strong action against
the company. I needed to find out what had come of that second
regulatory inspection.