The lawsuit had been filed by Theranos in federal court in San
Francisco. It alleged that he had conspired with Joe and John Fuisz,
his sons from his first marriage, to steal confidential patent
information from the company and used it to file his own rival patent.
The theft, the suit alleged, had been carried out by John on behalf of
his father while he was employed at Theranos’s former patent counsel,
McDermott Will & Emery.
The top of the complaint’s first page showed that Theranos had
hired the famous lawyer David Boies to represent it. However, as
renowned as Boies was, someone at his firm had fumbled their
research and named the wrong Fuisz company. It was Fuisz Pharma,
Richard and Joe’s new firm—not Fuisz Technologies—that the patent
in question had been assigned to. Fuisz had refused service because he
wanted to make Boies sweat his mistake.
Fuisz and his sons were angered by the suit, but they weren’t overly
worried about it at first. They were confident in the knowledge that its
allegations were false. The first and only time Fuisz had brought up
Elizabeth Holmes’s startup with John was in an email he had sent his
son in July 2006 with a link to a Theranos patent application he’d
spotted in the patent office’s public database. The email, which was
sent more than two months after Fuisz filed his own provisional
patent, asked if John knew who at McDermott had worked on the
Theranos application. John replied that McDermott was a large firm
and that he had no idea. The exchange had scarcely registered with
John. More than five years later, he had no memory of it. As far as he
was concerned, this lawsuit was the first time he’d seen or heard the
word “Theranos.”
John had no reason to wish Elizabeth or her family ill; on the
contrary. When he was in his early twenties, Chris Holmes had written
him a letter of recommendation that helped him gain admission to
Catholic University’s law school. Later, John’s first wife had gotten to
know Noel Holmes through Lorraine Fuisz and become friendly with
her. Noel had even dropped by their house when John’s first son was
born to bring the baby a gift.
Moreover, Richard and John Fuisz weren’t close. John thought his