By now, you’ve probably seen the trailer for “You Can See Everything,” the documentary that was supposed to be a portrait of Elizabeth Holmes in her last days before going to prison, but, as the promotional description says, turned into “a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss.”
The trailer shows her unblinking dark eyes and Joker’s grin as she says, “I’m always being real.”
I too have stood at the abyss and come away with a puff-piece news story I wrote with a bent mind.
Her eyes weren’t dark when I met Holmes in a conference room in the basement of the Arizona state House in 2015. They were striking blue, and they didn’t blink then either.
I got 15 minutes to interview her as she held court, boxed lunches on the table, lobbyists, her entourage and Heather Carter, then a state representative, standing around.
One of the principals of a Phoenix public affairs firm that was representing Holmes called me that morning and asked if I wanted to meet a billionaire. I hadn’t heard of her or her company, Theranos, but who doesn’t want to get away from their desk for a while to meet a billionaire?
Forbes magazine estimated her worth at $4.5 billion, or as I pointed out in the article, “more than half of Arizona’s general fund” at the time.
She was at the Capitol that day to push a bill that would allow a person to get tested for any medical condition without a doctor’s order. The bill benefited her company, which had developed a product that could detect disease with a drop of blood.
Except it didn’t work — the sham eventually led her to the same prison camp as Ghislaine Maxwell.
Arizona was at the center of the scam, and the state gave Holmes a full embrace before things unraveled.
Theranos opened its main lab in Scottsdale with a few hundred employees and the company partnered with Walgreens to put kiosks in 40 of its stores for customers to test their blood. Policymakers used the law she pushed as an example of the state’s pro-business, innovation-friendly environment.
That day in the basement, she wore her signature black turtleneck sweater — the hip visionary look at the time — and heavily applied red lipstick. But it was when she talked that the magic worked.
She later admitted, after her scam unraveled, that she faked her throaty voice. But that day, she used it to tell me how her favorite uncle’s death from cancer drove her lobbying efforts. He might still be alive if the law she proposed and Carter sponsored had been in effect, she told me.
“That’s what my life is about,” she said.
I’ve never been starstruck before. I always go into an interview with a healthy bundle of skepticism.
But I fell under her spell with her college dropout-to-billionaire story, her voice, her posture, those unblinking eyes, all of which I captured with a photograph.
I thought I was in the company of a true 31-year-old revolutionary.
And then Republican Congressman David Schweikert burst in to speak with her. Carter asked if I could let the congressman interrupt for a minute. He didn’t ask, he just fell over himself to get to her, a Joker-grin of his own as he close-talked her.
Why wasn’t he in Washington, D.C., on this weekday in February? He ignored me. Going hands on would be a federal crime and ruin me professionally, but it did cross my mind. Carter looked at me a little sheepishly. I told Schweikert again I had a deadline and needed to finish my interview. He finished up without acknowledging me.
Holmes apologized and gave me a couple more minutes and her business card. I followed her and her entourage out of the building. I think she was on her way to meet then-Gov. Doug Ducey, who eventually signed her bill months later at a special ceremony.
I returned to the newsroom and wrote a glowing article about her and her bill.
I tossed her business card out a few years later with a little chuckle knowing she had duped me that day.
Those big fat early ballots are landing in mailboxes across Arizona this week, and you’ve got a lot of bubbles to fill in.
Before you start guessing, open the Elections Agenda.
It’s our voter guide for every statewide, congressional and legislative race on your ballot, plus the propositions.
You get candidate bios, district stats, debate videos, who’s funding them, and every time they’ve shown up in In Other News.
Some of it’s pretty funny.
Everything you need, in one place, so you never have to wade into a candidate’s Facebook page. (But we have those links too, in case you’re curious.)
Casting call for election nutters: Activist Merissa Caldwell, an election denier who’s a kinda sorta aide to Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, freaked out progressive groups when she told her followers to flood the Recorder’s Office with job applications, Stephanie Murray reports for the Republic. Caldwell has really made a name for herself this election cycle. For the uninitiated, Caldwell is married to Jeff Caldwell, who is Heap’s “special projects director,” (whatever that means) and she leads the Arizona chapter of a nonprofit headed by Cleta Mitchell, who funneled $1 million to Cyber Ninjas during that fiasco. Mitchell also was on the infamous phone call when President Donald Trump tried to pressure Georgia elections officials into finding more votes for him.
Wait, has anyone checked on Arizona in a while?: The national press is starting to get a little worried that election deniers in Arizona could end up running the state. At the Washington Post, reporters focused on whether Arizona secretary of state candidate and current Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin would try to relive his glory days of muddying the waters after the 2020 election. Over at Politico, reporters spoke with a retiree in Maricopa County who’s still obsessed with the 2020 election, although he’s much more eager to talk about it than the slate of election-denying Republican candidates who are trying to distance themselves from the madness as the November 3 elections approach.
Camera shy: Gov. Katie Hobbs’ lieutenant governor nominee John Giles doesn’t have much to say about several traffic tickets he received after voting to expand Mesa’s photo radar enforcement operation as a city council member, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. Conservative blog FOIAzona dug up traffic records and red-light camera photos showing Giles behind the wheel. All the citations were dismissed, but Giles wouldn’t explain why or whether his position as Mesa mayor had anything to do with it.
Wrong guy: A Trump-aligned PAC attacking Navajo congressional candidate Jonathan Nez used a photo of the wrong candidate in a TV ad, the Republic’s Laura Gersony reports. The ad instead showed a dramatic black-and-white photo of Myron Lizer, who served as Nez’s vice president of the Navajo Nation from 2019 to 2023. Republican groups are pouring money into Congressional District 2 despite its solid Republican lean, but they might want to throw some dollars at fact-checkers instead.
The outrage!: Gubernatorial hopeful Andy Biggs is “as mad as anybody who has righteous indignation can be” over accusations that he killed a bill to rein in a police force tied to a polygamous sect in Colorado City 13 years ago, the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger reports. The legislation is becoming a theme of Hobbs’ campaign against Biggs, and while Biggs assigned the bill to multiple committees — a common tactic legislative leaders use to kill bills — he says he was just making sure the bill was properly vetted.
These assholes: In a particularly grotesque display of victim blaming, the all-male cast of the “The Charlie Kirk Show“ podcast accused Democratic Congressional District 8 candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia of fabricating her account of being violently sexually assaulted while repairing campaign signs, the New Times’ Morgan Fischer reports. The podcasters read out a slew of offensive social media comments, and they suggested Greene-Placentia’s decision to speak publicly about the assault was a political “Hail Mary” to salvage her election prospects. Six people close to Greene-Placentia corroborated details of her account to New Times in the days and weeks following the attack.
Beyond the Ballot AZ is a weekly show about legendary Arizonans, notable — and sometimes notorious — political events, and the social movements still shaping the arguments we’re having today.
A resource of the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission, hosted by Executive Director Tom Collins and Director of Voter Education Gina Roberts, who break down what’s happening and how you can actually get involved in it. Same state you’ve been reading about all morning, with a lot more context.
ASU President Michael Crow couldn’t quite pull it off.
He bowed and scraped before Trump officials as they mounted a pressure campaign to force universities to follow the president’s agenda last year.
But ASU still made it on the administration’s shit list.
Vice President JD Vance announced that nine universities, including ASU, “merit an investigation” for bringing in foreign workers to undercut the wages of American researchers.
ASU’s response was predictably tame. Instead of calling bullshit on the whole thing, it sent out a news release talking about the importance of STEM research and saying the university followed the law.