Key Points
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New Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, references a quote the New York Times attributed to her that she argued was inaccurate.
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The outlet’s reporter addressed the subject in an interview published this week.
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The new movie about the disgraced Theranos founder was co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.
It started like any other profile, with a reporter, the New York Times‘ Amy Chozick, interviewing Theranos founder and fraudster Elizabeth Holmes.
After the piece was published in 2023, Holmes herself, who in November 2022 was convicted of defrauding investors, alleged that one quote was incorrect. It was a single word in this sentence she said about actors portraying her, as Amanda Seyfried did in the 2022 series The Dropout: “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”
In her memory, Holmes said the character was one “they created.” It’s a subject that comes up in the new documentary You Can See Everything.
Chozick affirmed the quote on Thursday in a story in which the outlet said, “We stand by the reporting.”
“It was six weeks before Holmes went to prison for fraud,” Chozick said of when she heard the comment. “[Her partner Billy] Evans had gone to the gym, and Holmes and I walked their dog, Teddy, on the beach outside their Del Mar, Calif., rental home. I was taking notes in my reporter’s notebook. At that point, we’d already spent several days together and talked extensively about the persona she’d adopted as the chief executive of Theranos.”
She continued, “We talked about why she made her voice deeper and wore black turtlenecks and red lipstick, so it was an extension of that conversation. As we walked, I told Holmes that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had recently pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She looked over at me, and said: ‘They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.’ As she walked a couple of steps ahead, I wrote down her exact words in my notebook.”
Chozick, who’s since left the newspaper to become an author and screenwriter, said her process had been to comb through her notes each night and mark anything she thought that she might use, and that was the case for the quote in question.
The reporter said she had not recorded the interview.
“A lot of people’s most honest, on-the-record reflections come when I turn off my recorder and just take notes,” Chozick said. “I wasn’t going to put a recorder in Holmes’ face as we walked on the beach.”
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She said that she takes extensive notes “to jot down important quotes and details and to incorporate my impressions in real time,” but that even those are eventually tossed.
“I generally keep my reporter’s notebooks for a couple of years before getting rid of them,” Chozick said. “My editors confirmed the quote with me in 2023, and I thought the matter was resolved. I didn’t anticipate that the quote would become a part of a documentary years later. Of course, now I really wish I’d kept that notebook.”
The Timesnoted that Evans says in the movie that he did record the exchange between Holmes and Chozick, and he plays a piece of that tape that doesn’t include the disputed quote.
And Chozick argued that there were moments that weren’t captured.
“A lot of the most revealing moments came when the recorders were turned off,” she said. “For example, when they were loading the babies into the Tesla or when we went to the San Diego Zoo and got tacos at the Lucha Libre Taco Shop in Mission Hills. I wrote down quotes and details as the conversations unfolded.”
Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the new movie shows what happened when Holmes, 34 days before she went to prison, invites a skeptical film crew to record her every move.
You Can See Everything is in theaters now.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
