The Theranos whistleblower believes Nathan Fielder’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes deliberately omitted key facts about the founder’s history of deception to make for a more compelling film.
“You Can See Everything” follows the Theranos founder in the weeks leading up to her prison sentence for defrauding investors in her blood-testing company.
“Citizen McCain” host Meghan McCain said that she felt like Holmes was portrayed as a more sympathetic figure than she was comfortable with, citing the use of her children and breast feeding in the documentary.
Tyler Shultz argued that it was intentional for Fielder’s more artistic style of documentary filmmaking.
“It would not have been an interesting film if he just took her to the slaughterhouse, which would have been easy to do,” the whistleblower said.
He said the film’s central question was whether Holmes is a liar, but argued that a broader examination of the facts would have made it easy to establish her history of intentional deception.
In the film, Fielder asks Holmes directly whether she has ever told a lie, even a small fib. She says she does not believe she has.
“There are so many instances of her just blatantly lying where it would just kind ruin the film,” Shultz argued.”So to make an interesting film, they chose to ignore the truth.”
Shultz revealed to McCain that this documentary has brought Holmes back into the zeitgeist much more than even Hulu’s 2022 series “The Dropout,” in which Amanda Seyfried played the Theranos founder.
“For a lot of people, this is the only interaction or experience that they will have with Elizabeth and the Theranos story, and it will be very easy for them to walk away having sympathy for her and thinking that maybe she’s wrongfully incarcerated, and that is not a good takeaway,” he said.
McCain also said that it was obvious to her that Holmes and her husband Billy Evans “want a Trump pardon,” specifically referencing how Evans sympathized with Charlie Kirk.
“It’s very clear that her husband Billy is conservative or pretending to be,” she said.
The whistleblower said that the documentary’s intent from the Holmes camp was definitely in part to curry sympathy from the public.
McCain also asks directly about Holmes’ description of the actual Theranos device. The founder claimed that they had the technology but the chemistry needed to be up to snuff in order for it to actually test for multiple things at once.
“She was totally just saying that to mislead Nathan, to mislead the audience,” the whistleblower said. “My main issue with that scene is that the device she showed him that ‘can run any test’ was never completed and was never used on patients.”
He noted that the device he was actually using at Theranos was far more rudimentary than that, was not accurate, was actively giving patients incorrect results.
“If she were able to raise her $900 million saying this … that wouldn’t have raised the money,” he said. “So instead, she chose to roll out the technology before it was ready to test real patients to give investors the illusion that that device was actually being used when it wasn’t.”
Watch McCain’s full interview with the Theranos whistleblower above.
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