magazine.” And she referred to me as “some guy” who had reported “false stuff about us.”
One problem she faced was that we were no longer the only ones raising questions about Theranos. Several prominent Silicon Valley figures had begun criticizing the company publicly. One of them was a well-known former Apple executive named Jean-Louis Gassée. A few days earlier, Gassée had published an item on his blog describing sharply discordant blood-test results he had received from Theranos and Stanford Hospital over the summer. Gassée had written Holmes to inquire about the discrepancies but had never received a response. When Krim raised Gassée’s case, Holmes claimed to have never received his email. Now that it knew about his complaint, Theranos would reach out to him to try to understand what had happened, she said.
As for the other instances of inaccurate test results described in our first story, she dismissed them as a few isolated cases from which general conclusions could not and should not be drawn.
Soon after the interview ended, Theranos posted a long document on its website that purported to rebut my reporting point by point. Mike and I went over it with the standards editors and the lawyers and concluded that it contained nothing that undermined what we had published. It was another smokescreen. The paper put out a statement to say that it stood by my stories.
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AFTER HOLMES’S APPEARANCE at the Journal conference, Theranos announced that it was making changes to its board of directors, which had been getting lampooned since the publication of my first story. George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, and the other aging ex-statesmen all left to join a new ceremonial body called a board of counselors. In their place, Theranos made a new director appointment that signaled an escalation of hostilities: David Boies.
Sure enough, within days, the Journal received letters from Heather King demanding that it retract the central elements of my first two articles, calling them “libelous assertions.” A third letter followed demanding that the paper retain all documents in its possession concerning Theranos, “including emails, instant messages, drafts, informal files, handwritten notes, faxes, memoranda, calendar entries, voice mail and any other Records stored in hard copy, or any electronic form (including personal cell phones) or any other medium.”
In an interview with Wired, Boies suggested that a defamation suit was likely. “I think enough has now been put on the record so people are chargeable with being knowledgeable with what the facts are,” he told the magazine. Taking King and Boies at their words, the Journal’s legal department dispatched a technician to copy the contents of my laptop and phone in preparation for litigation.
But if Theranos thought this saber rattling would make us stand down, it was mistaken. Over the next three weeks, we published four more articles. They revealed that Walgreens had halted a planned nationwide expansion of Theranos wellness centers, that Theranos had tried to sell more shares at a higher valuation days before my first story was published, that its lab was operating without a real director, 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,