and gave it to Mark Pandori to pass on to Elizabeth and Sunny. It said she disagreed with running patient samples on the Edisons and that she didn’t think she and the company shared “the same standards in patient care and quality.” After taking a look at it, Mark gave it back to her and recommended she leave quietly without making waves.
Erika thought about it for a moment and decided he was probably right. She folded the letter back up and put it in her backpack. But while processing Erika’s resignation in her office a few minutes later, Mona asked if she had taken anything from the company. To show she hadn’t, Erika opened her backpack and showed her its contents. Mona spotted the letter inside and confiscated it. She made Erika sign a new confidentiality agreement and warned her against writing anything about Theranos on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other forum.
“We have ways of tracking that,” she said. “We’ll see it if you post anything anywhere.”
| SEVENTEEN |
Fame
Richard and Joe Fuisz sat warily across from David Boies and one of his partners at a table in the lobby lounge of San Jose’s Fairmont hotel. It was a Sunday evening in the middle of March and the usually bustling lounge’s two grand pianos were quiet, allowing the four men to speak without raising their voices. Boies, looking relaxed and dapper in a navy blazer and his signature black sneakers, had called the meeting to discuss settling the litigation that had pitted the Fuiszes against Theranos for the past two and a half years.
Initially determined to fight the lawsuit to the bitter end, Richard and Joe were tired and battered. The trial had started a few days earlier at the federal courthouse down the street and the extent to which they were outgunned had fully dawned on them. Unhappy with their lawyers and their mounting legal costs, they had gone “pro se” several months earlier. What had seemed then like a reasonable decision now looked foolish: Joe, a patent attorney who had never tried a case, was no match for the country’s best litigator and his army of associates.
The death of Ian Gibbons had also been a big setback. It briefly looked like they might be able to make up for it by calling his widow, Rochelle, as a witness. After Richard managed to make contact with her, Rochelle told him that Elizabeth had tried to bully Ian into not testifying and that Ian thought she was dishonest. But the judge overseeing the case had denied the Fuiszes’ late motion to call Rochelle to the stand.
More damaging, though, had been Richard Fuisz’s own courtroom testimony two days earlier. Boies had caught him in a series of pointless lies that, while they did nothing to prove Theranos’s theft allegations, had undermined his credibility. One of them was Fuisz’s contention that he still practiced medicine and treated patients—a claim his own wife had refuted in her deposition. For no discernible reason other than pride, Fuisz had refused to back away from it even after Boies confronted him with her testimony. In his rambling opening argument, Fuisz had also stated that his patent had nothing to do with Theranos, which was absurd on its face given that his patent application mentioned the company by name and quoted from its website.
Joe had watched his father’s disastrous performance on the stand with growing alarm. His dad had once been an amazing pitchman in business settings because he was a terrific schmoozer and improviser, but that off-the-cuff, loose-with-the-facts approach didn’t work when you were being questioned under oath by a legal ace ready to pounce on any inconsistency. It didn’t help that, at seventy-four years old, Richard’s memory was beginning to slip.
Joe feared his brother John’s upcoming testimony might turn into another liability. Boies knew John had a bad temper and would no doubt find ways to press his buttons in front of the jury. He had already brought up the fact that John had threatened Elizabeth during his deposition.
When he added it all up in his mind, Joe knew they were in trouble. And with a courtroom defeat looking like a very real possibility, he was haunted by a terrifying thought: What if they not only lost, but the judge made them cover Theranos’s legal expenses? He shivered to think how much money their opponent was spending on the case. He worried it might be enough to bankrupt him and his father both. They