drafts of the affidavit.
Tyler tried to be conciliatory in an effort to reach an agreement, acknowledging in the new versions of the document that he had talked to the Journal. Theranos gave him the option of saying that he was young and naïve and that the reporter had deceived him, but he declined. He had known exactly what he was doing and youth had nothing to do with it. He hoped he would have acted the exact same way if he had been forty or fifty. To placate Theranos, Tyler did consent to being portrayed as a junior employee whose duties were so menial that he couldn’t possibly have known what he was talking about when it came to topics like proficiency testing, assay validation, and lab operations.
But the negotiations stalled over two issues. Theranos still wanted Tyler to name the Journal’s other sources, which Tyler steadfastly refused to do. And the company declined to include his parents and heirs in the litigation release it was willing to grant him. As the stalemate dragged on, Boies Schiller resorted to the bare-knuckle tactics it had become notorious for. Brille let it be known that if Tyler didn’t sign the affidavit and name the Journal’s sources, the firm would make sure to bankrupt his entire family when it took him to court. Tyler also received a tip that he was being surveilled by private investigators. His lawyer tried to make light of it.
“It’s not a huge deal,” he said. “Just don’t go anywhere you’re not supposed to be and remember to smile and wave to the man in the bushes outside your house when you leave for work.”
One evening, Tyler’s parents received a call from his grandfather. George said Holmes had told him that Tyler was responsible for most of the information the Journal had and was being completely unreasonable. Tyler’s parents sat him down in their kitchen and pleaded with him to sign whatever Theranos wanted him to sign at the next opportunity. Otherwise, they would have to sell their house to pay for his legal costs. It wasn’t that simple, Tyler replied, unable to say much more. He badly wanted to explain to them what was going on, but he was under instructions not to discuss the negotiations with Theranos with anyone.
To allow Tyler to update his parents about where things stood, Taylor arranged for them to have their own legal counsel. That way he could communicate with them through attorneys and those conversations would be protected by attorney-client privilege. This led to an incident that rattled both Tyler and his parents. Hours after his parents’ new lawyer met with them for the first time, her car was broken into and a briefcase containing her notes from the meeting was stolen. Although it could have been a random act of theft, Tyler couldn’t shake his suspicion that Theranos had something to do with it.
* * *
—
I HAD NO IDEA any of this was happening. After Tyler’s anxious call the evening he had dinner at his parents’ house, I tried to check back in with him. I sent an email to his Colin Ramirez address, which he’d insisted we continue using for his protection, and called him on his burner phone. But my email went unanswered and the phone appeared to be turned off and didn’t have a voicemail. I continued to try the email address and the phone for several weeks, to no avail. Tyler had gone dark.
I suspected Theranos was putting the screws to him, but I couldn’t confront the company about it since he was a confidential source. I hoped he wouldn’t cave under pressure and I took comfort in the fact that he had already sent me his email to Holmes questioning Theranos’s practices and the complaint he had filed with New York State. When added to the internal email trail about proficiency testing I had obtained from Alan Beam, it made for a damning trove of documents.
I pressed forward with my reporting, calling the New York State Health Department to inquire about what had come of Tyler’s anonymous complaint. It had been forwarded to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for investigation, I was told. But when I called CMS, I learned that no one there could find any trace of it. It had somehow been lost in the shuffle. To their credit, the folks who ran the agency’s lab-oversight division seemed serious about following up on it now that they knew