miniLab’s spectrophotometer didn’t yet meet certain specifications Ian considered nonnegotiable. Sam had previously agreed to them but now said he needed more time. When he returned to his desk, Ian was distraught.
On weekends, Ian and Rochelle often went on walks in the rolling hills surrounding Portola Valley with Chloe and Lucy, their two American Eskimo dogs. During one of these walks, Ian told Rochelle that nothing at Theranos was working, but he didn’t go into any details. The strict nondisclosure agreements he was bound by prevented him from discussing anything specific about the company, even with his wife. He also bemoaned the turn his career had taken. He felt like an old piece of furniture that had been warehoused. Elizabeth and Sunny had long stopped listening to him.
In the early months of 2013, Ian stopped going into the office on most days and instead worked from home. He’d been diagnosed with colon cancer six years earlier and had missed some time at work after undergoing surgery and chemotherapy. Colleagues assumed that the cancer had returned. But that was not the case. He remained in remission and his physical health was fine. The problem lay with his mental health: he was in the throes of a deep, undiagnosed clinical depression.
* * *
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IN APRIL, Theranos informed Ian that he had been subpoenaed to testify in the Fuisz case. The prospect of being deposed made him nervous. He and Rochelle discussed the lawsuit several times. Rochelle had once done work as a patent attorney, so Ian asked her to review Theranos’s patent portfolio in the hope that she could give him some advice. While doing so, she noticed that Elizabeth’s name was on all the company’s patents, often in first place in the list of inventors. When Ian told her that Elizabeth’s scientific contribution had been negligible, Rochelle warned him that the patents could be invalidated if this was ever exposed. That only served to make him more agitated.
Ian couldn’t tell whether there was any foundation for Elizabeth’s theft allegation when he read the Fuisz patent and the early Theranos patent applications side by side. But he knew one thing for sure: he didn’t want to be involved in the case. And yet he worried that his job depended on it. He’d started drinking heavily in the evenings. He told Rochelle that he didn’t think he could ever resume a normal schedule at Theranos. The thought of going back to the office made him sick, he said. Rochelle told him he should quit if the job made him that miserable. But resigning didn’t seem like an option to him. At age sixty-seven, he didn’t think he would be able to find another job. He also clung to the idea that he could still help the company fix its problems.
On May 15, Ian contacted Elizabeth’s assistant to schedule a meeting with her, hoping to work out some sort of alternative employment arrangement. But when the assistant called back to confirm a meeting for the next day, Ian became anxious. He told Rochelle he was worried that Elizabeth would use the meeting to fire him. That same day, he got a call from the Theranos lawyer David Doyle. After trying for weeks to get the Boies Schiller attorneys to propose a date for Ian’s deposition, the Fuiszes’ lawyers had run out of patience and sent notice that he would have to appear at their offices in Campbell, California, at 9:00 a.m. on May 17.
That’s what Doyle was calling about. With the deadline for his appearance less than two days away, the lawyer encouraged Ian to invoke health issues to get out of the deposition and emailed him a doctor’s note for his physician to adapt and sign. Ian forwarded the email to his personal Gmail address and, from there, to his wife’s email address, asking her to print it. His anxiety seemed to reach a new fevered pitch.
Rochelle had known for a while that Ian wasn’t well, but she’d had other concerns weighing on her mind: she was grieving her mother, who had just passed away and left behind a complicated estate to sort out, and she had just launched a new law practice with an associate. Part of her had been resentful that she wasn’t getting the marital support she needed during this stressful period of her life. But Ian’s anguished state that day made her realize how dire his mental condition had become. She got him to agree to get help