The same media that couldn't be bothered to investigate Theranos while Elizabeth Holmes was bilking investors out of hundreds of millions is now obsessing over her fiancé's full-frontal shower scene in a new documentary. Billy Evans appears completely naked in A24's "You Can See Everything," and the New York Post led its coverage with that grain of information — because in today's press culture, a convicted fraudster's boyfriend in a shower apparently warrants more ink than how she got away with it for so long.
The documentary, directed by comedian Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, follows Holmes during her final month of freedom before reporting to prison in 2023. Holmes and Evans reportedly contacted A24 as a "last-ditch effort to exonerate her in the public eye," according to TechCrunch. That's the real story: a convicted fraudster using a Hollywood production as a rehabilitation vehicle, and the press playing along.
Holmes maintains throughout the film that she never lied and never committed any crime. "I know I didn't commit any crime," she tells Fielder. When he asks if she's ever told a lie in her life, she replies, "I don't think so." The Post reported that Fielder was left "gobsmacked." Business Insider's reviewer vacillated between pitying Holmes and being "freaked out" by her — which is exactly the reaction a skilled manipulator engineers.
Meanwhile, the institutional enablers who propped up Holmes get another pass. The Post notes a scene where Holmes cries watching Amanda Seyfried scream "Get the f—ing money!" while receiving advice from Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison — but nobody's asking what Ellison knew, or why the SEC and FDA sat on their hands while patients received incorrect blood test results from devices that didn't work. TechCrunch mentions whistleblowers "who were silenced when they flagged that Theranos' blood-testing devices didn't work" and patients who "acted on incorrect blood test results" — then moves right along.
Evans, a hotel heir and CEO of another blood-testing startup called Haemanthus, claimed The New York Times misquoted Holmes but never produced the evidence when Fielder repeatedly asked. The filmmakers grew so paranoid about their guest house lacking basic amenities like mattresses that they suspected they were being bugged. "We were in a conspiracy thriller of our own, we all were paranoid," Oppenheim said at a Los Angeles Q&A, per the Post.
Deadline reports the nearly three-hour documentary pulled $1.75 million in previews with a 92 percent definite recommend score and a 4.7 Letterboxd rating. The distraction machine works.
The question isn't whether Holmes is lying — she was convicted on four counts of wire fraud conspiracy. The question is why the press keeps letting her set the terms of coverage, and why the powerful men and captured regulators who made Theranos possible remain invisible while Evans stands in the shower.
