In case you are questioning, Holmes speaks in a delicate, barely low, however completely unremarkable voice, no trace of the throaty contralto she used whereas working her blood-testing startup Theranos, now defunct.
“I made so many mistakes and there was so much I didn’t know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it’s like you really internalise it in a deep way,” Holmes stated as we stopped to take a look at a hissing anaconda.
Billy Evans, Holmes’ associate and the daddy of their two younger kids, pushes a stroller with the couple’s 20-month-old son, William. William enjoys enjoying within the sand, “Little Blue Truck” and dumplings and, like his mother, already speaks some Mandarin.
But William particularly loves the San Diego Zoo, which is why, on a current Thursday afternoon, I discovered myself within the surreal scenario of making an attempt to make sense of Holmes’ model of her rise and fall, whereas watching a stressed cheetah and shopping for a gorilla T-shirt on the present store.
“How would you spend your time if you didn’t know how much time you had left?” Holmes stated, her impending jail report date prime of thoughts, maybe much more so provided that we had been surrounded by animals behind bars. “It would be the kind of things we’re doing now because they’re perfect. Just being together.”
Holmes has not spoken to the media since 2016, when her authorized crew suggested she go quiet. As the adage goes, if you happen to do not feed the press, we feed on you. In Holmes, we discovered an all-you-can-eat buffet. It had all the things: the black turtlenecks, the Kabuki crimson lipstick, the inexperienced juices, the dancing to Lil Wayne. Somewhere alongside the best way, Holmes stated that the particular person (whoever that’s) acquired misplaced. At one level, I inform her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a film. She replied, nearly reflectively, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” So why did she create that public persona? “I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn’t have good technical ideas,” stated Holmes, who based Theranos at 19. “Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn’t.”
Maybe?
Ten years in the past, Holmes was the world’s youngest self-made feminine billionaire, value $4.5 billion (on paper, in Theranos inventory), and one of the seen and celebrated feminine CEOs on the planet, working a startup with a $9 billion valuation. Then, in 2015, The Wall Street Journal printed an investigation into Theranos, calling into query whether or not its labs and know-how – a modern, boxy gadget referred to as the Edison – really labored as promised, testing for a variety of sicknesses with a tiny quantity of blood collected with a speedy finger prick.
In 2016, federal inspectors from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services discovered “deficient practices” in a Theranos lab that posed “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.”
That started a saga that may finally result in Holmes being convicted of legal fraud expenses.
The 15-week trial started in 2021 and featured in depth testimony about troubling practices at Theranos. The jury heard from a number of sufferers, together with one who stated a Theranos blood check revealed she was having a miscarriage when, in reality, she had a wholesome being pregnant. Holmes was not convicted on any counts associated to sufferers. But the testimony was a stark reminder of the human stakes of selecting biotech as your startup.
Holmes was discovered responsible in January 2022 on 4 of 11 expenses that she defrauded Theranos traders out of greater than $100 million. Her prime lieutenant at Theranos, and far older boyfriend on the time, Ramesh Balwani, was discovered responsible of 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud at Theranos. He started a 13-year jail sentence final month. On Thursday, his authorized crew filed an enchantment with the ninth Circuit.
During the intently adopted proceedings, a prosecutor, Robert Leach, stated this was a case “about fraud, about lying and cheating,” alleging that Theranos raised tons of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} from traders by deceptive them about its blood-testing know-how’s capabilities.
Lance Wade, a lawyer for Holmes, stated that his shopper “made mistakes, but mistakes are not crimes.”
By the time I met Holmes and Evans, they had been counting the times till April 27, when she had been required to report back to Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, for 11.25 years. (Shortly earlier than she was due at jail, Holmes made a last-minute request to stay free pending an enchantment, which robotically delayed her report date by an undetermined period of time.)
Day 44: the afternoon we ordered in Mexican meals at their quaint rental residence close to the Pacific.
Day 43: the morning we went for breakfast and Holmes breastfed her child, Invicta (Latin for “invincible”) and sang alongside to Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants” on the loudspeakers (“This is the first album I ever owned”).
Day 42: the time we had croissants and berries and Evans made espresso and we walked the couple’s 150-pound Great Dane-mastiff combine, Teddy, on the seaside.
On the second day we spent collectively, Evans requested me what essentially the most stunning a part of spending a lot time with Holmes was. I instructed him it is that I did not count on her to be so … regular?
If you did not know she was that Elizabeth, whose trajectory launched a cottage trade of podcasts, TV exhibits, Halloween costumes and groupies who offered blond wigs exterior her trial, then you definately would possibly sit subsequent to her on the Lucha Libre taco store in Mission Hills with out considering twice.
This is when Evans places on the deep voice. The guttural one which the world heard in Holmes’ TED Talk and CNBC appearances and in actress Amanda Seyfried’s Emmy-Award-winning flip as Holmes in Hulu’s “The Dropout.”
If you hate Elizabeth Holmes, you in all probability suppose her feigned perma-hoarseness was a part of an elaborate scheme to defraud traders. If you’re a one that is sympathetic to Holmes, then the James Earl Jones inflection was an indication of the inconceivable gymnastics that feminine founders should carry out to be taken critically. If you spend time with Holmes, as I did, then you definately would possibly come away like me, and suppose that, as with many issues about Holmes, it was each. Either means, even Evans agrees, the voice was actual bizarre.
He was driving the household’s Tesla. Holmes climbed in, after strapping the infants, calm and pleased, into their automobile seats. I rode shotgun. “That would be crazy, if she answered the door and said, ‘Hi. I’m Elizabeth Holmes,” Evans stated, imitating the voice. Holmes let loose the slightest of giggles from the again seat.
I realised that I used to be basically writing a narrative about two individuals. There was Elizabeth, celebrated within the media as a rock-star inventor whose brilliance dazzled illustrious wealthy males, and whose legal trial captivated the world. Then there may be Liz, (as Evans and her buddies name her), the mother of two who, for the previous 12 months, has been volunteering for a rape disaster hotline. Who cannot abdomen R-rated films and who rushed after me one afternoon with a paper towel to wipe a mixture of sand and her canine’s slobber off my shoe.
After Holmes was convicted, Rupert Murdoch, who invested $125 million in Theranos, emailed The Wall Street Journal, a newspaper he owns, calling himself “one of a bunch of old men taken in by a seemingly great young woman! Total embarrassment.”
I’m not a wiser or extra astute observer of human conduct than Murdoch or George Shultz, the previous secretary of state who helped finish the Cold War, or James Mattis, the retired four-star Marine Corps common and former protection secretary, each of whom had been Theranos board members and traders. So, how may I make certain that “Liz” wasn’t one other character that Holmes had created?
I used to be admittedly swept up in Liz as an genuine and sympathetic particular person. She’s light and charismatic, in a quiet means. My editor laughed at me once I shared these impressions, telling me (and I quote), “Amy Chozick, you got rolled!” I vigorously disagreed! You do not know her like I do! But then, one thing unusual occurred. I labored my means by way of a listing of Holmes’ buddies, household and longtime supporters, whom she and Evans urged I converse to. One of those buddies stated Holmes had real intentions at Theranos and did not deserve a prolonged jail sentence. Then, this particular person requested anonymity to warning me to not imagine all the things Holmes says.
This warning caught with me, and it acquired at one thing that had been gnawing on me since I first met Holmes. How do you’ve gotten an trustworthy dialog with an individual whose fraud trial has performed out so publicly? I attempted to ask Holmes this immediately. How do I imagine you while you’ve been convicted of (mainly) mendacity? But how may I ask somebody who was nursing her 11-day-old child on a white couch 2 toes away if she was conning me?
It was in these uncomfortable exchanges that Evans usually stepped in. “Your question is, ‘How do you say anything when everything you say is going to be doubted?’ You just have to say it,” he stated.
So, to only say it: Holmes is aware of what you are fascinated about her trial, and the start of her two infants.
When she alerted the courtroom March 12, 2021, that she was pregnant along with her first youngster, Leach, the prosecutor, referred to as the news “frustrating.” The trial had already been delayed due to the pandemic, and was pushed again a couple of extra weeks, till after she gave start that July.
Which is why she was there in a San Jose federal courthouse utilizing the high-tech Elvie breast pump with its glowing aqua nipples. “She looked like a fembot,” Evans stated.
At her sentencing listening to in November 2022, she was visibly pregnant along with her second youngster. That child was born in February. In March, Holmes’ protection crew partly cited her “two very young children” in arguing that she ought to stay free whereas interesting her fraud conviction. A Daily Mail headline referred to the newborn as a “Last-Ditch Bid for New Trial.”
But, as Holmes explains it, it is simply dangerous timing (to place it mildly). She is 39. She fell in love with Evans in 2017. They didn’t anticipate that she could be indicted. They didn’t anticipate that she could be sentenced to 11 years. They at all times wished an enormous household.
“If we let how other people might view that, or what impression someone might make of it dictate how we live our lives, then we’ve lost,” Holmes stated. “Finding your person in the middle of all of this and experiencing that love when you’re going through hell is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced.”
I’d hardly sat down in Holmes’ and Evans’ residence the primary time we met in particular person, when Holmes instructed me about her work on the rape-crisis hotline. She’d simply completed a 12-hour shift, which she does a couple of occasions per week from residence utilizing her cellphone, answering calls once they are available.
She then put this work into context, telling me how surviving a rape at a fraternity celebration her sophomore 12 months at Stanford had, on reflection, coloured so a lot of her life decisions. It’s the a part of her story that she retains getting again to.
The one she instructed a sympathetic, however in the end undeterred jury, in keeping with news experiences. The one she desires individuals to (lastly) hearken to. (I later reviewed a 52-page Santa Clara police report that documented the small print of the alleged sexual assault and Holmes’ accidents. Holmes didn’t press expenses.)
Holmes fingers the newborn to Evans. “I’ll give her to you when we’re talking about this stuff,” she stated. She continued, “I woke up with this guy who was my friend having sex with me and I couldn’t get him off of me.” Holmes stated the assault, in October 2003, contributed to her choice to drop out a number of months later and begin an organization.
To assist her try this, she turned to Balwani, often known as Sunny, whom she first met in 2002 on a university journey to China. Holmes was 18. Balwani was 37 and had already efficiently based and offered a tech firm.
In March 2004, her sophomore 12 months, Holmes left Stanford and moved in with Balwani to get Theranos off the bottom. (Balwani assured a mortgage to Theranos and joined the corporate in 2009.) “I really thought I’d be safe,” Holmes stated. “My friends at school and that whole universe, it didn’t exist anymore when I was with him. It was all gone.”
As Holmes defined it, echoing a key a part of her protection technique, Balwani stored shut management over her each motion. She detailed in depth home abuse and sexual assault. She stated that Balwani pressured her to cease chatting with her household and Stanford buddies and pressured her to undertake the black-turtleneck, red-lipstick persona.
“He always told me I needed to ‘kill Elizabeth,’ so I could become a good entrepreneur,” she stated.
Jeffrey Coopersmith, a lawyer for Balwani, denied the allegations. “Our client is not a person who is vindictive or mean spirited or aggressive,” he stated.
She lived by entrepreneurial tenets that she stated Balwani instructed her she wanted to comply with to be able to succeed. These included not sleeping for greater than 5 hours, going vegan, attending to the workplace every day by 5 a.m., no alcohol.
“It was only when people started to raise questions about the company that I started to see that he was not who I thought he was in business,” Holmes stated of Balwani. “And then that made me start to question everything else.”
One of the final occasions we spoke, I requested Holmes to make clear what she meant. As CEO, wasn’t she in cost? She stated Balwani didn’t management her each interplay or assertion at Theranos, however she “deferred to him in the areas he oversaw because I believed he knew better than I did,” and people areas included the problematic scientific lab.
Balwani’s lawyer, Coopersmith, stated his shopper was in common contact with Holmes about any points on the lab, including that she “was a strong woman who had a vision and Sunny was helping her execute her vision.”
Holmes’ story of how she acquired right here – to the brilliant, cozy home and the supportive associate and the 2 infants – feels so much just like the story of somebody who had lastly damaged out of a cult and been deprogrammed. After her relationship with Balwani ended and Theranos dissolved, Holmes stated, “I began my life again.”
But then I keep in mind that Holmes was working the cult.
In particular person, Holmes is partaking, however she can be considerably socially stunted. It’s as if Rip Van Winkle fell asleep in his early 20s in a startup and awoke a 32-year-old at Burning Man. That’s as a result of within the 14 years Holmes led Theranos she did not do any of the traditional issues 20-somethings do, in keeping with her family and friends.
Holmes had so few precise buddies, she stated, when she was working Theranos that she as soon as pulled a feminine pharmaceutical govt apart to ask if the best way Balwani handled her was regular in a relationship. However, the identical one that warned me about Holmes identified that she appeared to have loads of rich, well-known buddies on this interval.
In 2015, when The Wall Street Journal first reported on critical flaws in Theranos’ know-how, Debbie Sterling, an entrepreneur and classmate of Holmes’ from Stanford, reached out asking if Holmes wanted somebody to speak to. “She said, ‘I don’t have any friends. I only work, from the first thing in the morning until late at night,'” Sterling recalled. “It was kinda creepy.” She corrects herself, “Not creepy, but concerning.” They finally met for breakfast in Palo Alto.
Sterling stated she thought of her pal as two distinct individuals: There was “black turtleneck Elizabeth” and there was “real Elizabeth.” Sterling, together with a number of different Stanford buddies, attended the trial to help Holmes. But first she purchased brown drugstore hair dye, frightened that being seen there would possibly impugn her popularity.
In 2016, as regulators scrutinized Theranos, Balwani resigned. Theranos shut down its scientific laboratory and laid off roughly 40% of its estimated 790 staff. Holmes’ brother (and Theranos govt), Christian Holmes V, helped her pack up and transfer out of the mansion she’d shared with Balwani. Holmes, barred from working in a medical laboratory for 2 years, checked right into a resort after which rented a two-bedroom residence in Los Altos. She had nearly no belongings, so her mother and father despatched her some ’90s chintz furnishings that that they had in storage.
In 2017, as Theranos confronted an onslaught of authorized challenges, each civil and legal, Holmes moved to San Francisco, the place she met a current Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate and entrepreneur, Billy Evans, at a home celebration throughout Fleet Week to learn wounded warriors. Evans had gone out to get ice for a celebration he was internet hosting at his personal condo and a pal texted to ask if he was going to the profit. He agreed to swing by for a couple of minutes and by no means made it to again to his celebration.
A mutual pal launched him to Holmes and the pair talked for 3 hours. “My friends were texting, ‘Where are you? We’re here,” Evans recalled. “To say we immediately fell in love isn’t an overstatement.”
Evans was 25 and residing with roommates in San Francisco, however in some ways he was extra mature than Holmes. She was 32 and had by no means opened a bottle of wine. “Elizabeth lived in complete isolation with Sunny,” her father, Christian Holmes IV, stated. “It’s hard to explain the extent to which she missed so much of the growing up that someone does in their 20s.” As Theranos settled an onslaught of civil lawsuits and federal prosecutors closed in on legal expenses, Holmes began to socialize once more, reconnecting with household and buddies. “Despite everything going horribly in her life, we had our daughter back, and it was wonderful to see how she used to be,” stated her mom, Noel Holmes.
Holmes and Evans shortly turned greater than buddies and moved in collectively. “It had been two years of all this stuff written about me, and I think you get to know someone in a totally different way when you walk in with that skepticism versus if you meet when everything is sunshine and roses,” Holmes stated. “That allowed us to get to know each other in a really deep way.”
In 2018, the Justice Department indicted Holmes, accusing her of mendacity when she instructed traders that Theranos’ units may shortly carry out a full vary of scientific blood exams utilizing a finger prick, though she knew the exams had been unreliable, restricted and gradual.
The much-hyped field did not do a lot. And many of the guarantees that put Holmes on the map turned out to be fiction.
The Theranos board, failing to discover a purchaser for the startup, finally dissolved the corporate.
Where do you go when your life’s work and popularity go up in flames? Burning Man.
Holmes and Evans went to the desert oasis for moneyed bohemians. She burned a tribute to Theranos. “There was an incredible sense of grief because I’d given everything to it, my whole life, since I’d been 18,” she stated of that interval.
The subsequent 12 months, in 2019, after U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila set a date for Holmes’ legal trial, she and Evans hit the street. As prosecutors assembled their case, Holmes and Evans spent six months touring the nation in an leisure car, sleeping in campgrounds and Walmart parking tons. Holmes balanced outside yoga and lengthy hikes in nationwide parks with engaged on her authorized protection.
I inform Holmes (in so many phrases) that it looks as if she turned blissfully pleased simply as her life was falling aside. She doesn’t disagree. “Even though that period was a crisis and Theranos was my life and like my child, I gave everything I had to it,” she stated. After it was gone, “I also became free.”
At least, for now.
Evans, whose mother and father are distinguished hoteliers in San Diego, and Holmes have an us-against-the-world ethos that’s each romantic and rings barely of Bonnie and Clyde. They say they have been chased out of residence after residence, irrespective of how distant. On my strategy to their entrance door, I stroll previous rows of orange storage containers stuffed with the couple’s private belongings. They by no means unpack, Evans explains, involved they’re going to have to maneuver once more once they’re discovered.
The morning we went to the zoo, Evans stopped at Starbucks. He returned to seek out the barista had written “Billy the Kid” on his espresso cup. Holmes did not get the reference.
Evans took a couple of requires work whereas I used to be visiting. I requested what he does. “A lot of different stuff, investing, starting companies,” he replied, with out elaborating. How is Holmes paying her authorized bills? “I can’t,” she stated. “I have to work for the rest of my life to try to pay for it.” I requested if Evans’ household was serving to to cowl her authorized bills. She shook her head no.
An earlier authorized crew give up after Holmes couldn’t pay them. One pre-sentencing report by the federal government put her authorized charges at greater than $30 million. Holmes didn’t element how these charges could be paid, and her present representatives at Williams & Connolly didn’t reply to emails asking about her monetary association.
Their toddler, William, not too long ago had 105-degree fever, the couple stated. They raced him to the emergency room. The very first thing the attending physician stated was, “You look a lot like that horrible woman.” Holmes checked out him along with her piercing blue eyes, and stated, “I’m sure you’re a better person than she is.” The physician appeared to appreciate who he was speaking to. She continued, “Then he said, ‘Are you Elizabeth Holmes?’ And I said yes and he said, ‘I am so sorry,’ and I said, ‘Don’t be, all you know is what you’ve read.'”
By Evans’ father, William L. Evans’ tally, there are “over 67,600,600” internet outcomes on Holmes, all of them adverse, in contrast with “21 million results, many of which are positive” for Osama bin Laden, figures he wrote in a letter to the courtroom. Holmes’ mom, Noel, stated she stopped chilly in a Barnes & Noble when she noticed her daughter characterised in a guide show as a “paranoid sociopath” who’s “devoid of conscience.”
“Everybody got on the train that Elizabeth was evil, and it was great copy, and they took it and ran with it,” stated Holmes’ father, Christian.
Holmes’ defenders, stretching again to childhood, stated in letters to the courtroom, and in conversations with me, that the feverish protection of Holmes’ downfall felt like a witch trial, much less rooted in what really occurred at Theranos, and extra of a message to formidable ladies all over the place. Don’t lady boss too near the solar, or this might occur to you.
“There’s an unspoken lesson for female executives: You’re allowed to be successful but not too successful,” Jackie Lamping, a Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sister of Holmes’ at Stanford, wrote in a letter to Davila, who oversaw the trial.
Holmes stated she believed that making herself the poster lady for ladies in tech put an enormous goal on her again. She regrets being the topic of fawning journal covers (although I think about the authors of these tales remorse it extra). “I never lost sight of the mission but I think I did of the narrative,” she stated. “The story became this story that was totally snowballed away from what we were actually talking about.”
Of course, Holmes additionally tried to manage the story, usually with scorched-earth techniques. She is often docile, however acquired visibly upset once I requested about how lawyer David Boies had threatened litigation in opposition to individuals who spoke negatively about Theranos. Alex Shultz, the daddy of the Theranos worker turned whistleblower Tyler Shultz, and the son of George Shultz, instructed the courtroom that Tyler “slept with a knife under his pillow every night thinking that someone was going to come and murder him in the night.” (Holmes and Boies parted methods and she or he changed her authorized crew in 2016.)
“I’m still thinking about the journalists being intimidated,” Holmes stated after we might moved on to a number of different matters. “As I said at trial, I completely wish we’d handled that situation differently.” She tears up. “I take responsibility for it because I was CEO of the company and at the end of the day, that’s that, but I don’t believe in people being treated that way, period.” (In response to Holmes seemingly casting blame on her authorized crew, a spokesperson for Boies texted, “Whatever.”)
Holmes chooses her phrases fastidiously once I ask if the distinguished males who invested and joined the Theranos board had been drawn to the startup partly as a result of the founder was a gorgeous younger lady. “A lot of people were attracted to this for their own reasons,” she stated.
What does she suppose would have occurred if she hadn’t garnered a lot early consideration because the second coming of Silicon Valley? Holmes doesn’t blink: “We would’ve seen through our vision.” In different phrases, she thinks if she’d spent extra time quietly engaged on her innovations and fewer time on a stage selling the corporate, she would have revolutionized well being care by now.
This form of misguided speak is the one constant thread in my reporting on who Holmes actually is. She repeatedly says that Theranos wasn’t a get-rich-quick scheme for her; she by no means offered her shares and did not come out of it rich. Holmes’ mother and father stated they borrowed $500,000 in opposition to their Washington, D.C.-area residence to submit Holmes’ bond.
I am unable to shake an earlier story that Evans relayed. In the waning days of Theranos, Holmes acquired a canine, a Siberian husky named Balto. Last 12 months, when a mountain lion carried Balto away from the entrance porch, Holmes spent 16 hours looking within the woods, digging by way of brambles and poison oak, hoping to seek out him alive. Everyone knew Balto was useless, however Holmes stored looking. The relentlessness. The certainty. The fanaticism. It’s the identical means Holmes stored hanging on at Theranos.
Over antioxidant smoothies, Holmes instructed me she has concepts for COVID testing, drawing on her work in a Singapore lab as a university pupil through the SARS outbreak.
She maintains the idealistic delusion of a 19-year-old, by no means thoughts that she’s 39 with a fraud conviction, telling me she remains to be engaged on well being care-related innovations and would proceed to take action behind bars.
“I still dream about being able to contribute in that space,” Holmes stated. “I still feel the same calling to it as I always did and I still think the need is there.”
If your head is exploding at how divorced from actuality this sounds, that is form of the purpose. When Holmes makes use of the messianic vernacular of tech, I get the sense that she actually believes that she may have – and, in reality, she nonetheless may – change the world, and she or he does not a lot care if we imagine her or not. “Liz is not a natural born leader; she is more of a zealot than a showman,” Evans wrote to Davila.
It’s this steadfast (or unhinged?) perception that has stored Holmes preventing, though a responsible plea would have probably helped her probabilities of remaining free. “She could have said, ‘Yes, I lied, and I tried my best to save mankind, but this happened in my enthusiasm,'” her father instructed me. “But she has taken the position that she is not guilty and that takes guts.”
Holmes finally discovered her beloved husky, Balto, within the woods. But by then the canine was gone, torn aside by the mountain lion.
The final day I spent with Holmes, I parked and walked up the lengthy driveway to seek out her and Evans embracing within the kitchen. They appeared like they had been gradual dancing, swaying barely, the 2 of them in opposition to the world. Fireplace burning. Seagulls flying overhead. Teddy drooling in his crate. Babies (plural) sleeping.
Evans left for a exercise, saying he does not need “dad bod.” Holmes and I sat on the kitchen desk alone, speaking. She did not look like a hero or a villain. She appeared, like most individuals, someplace in between. As Holmes broke down fascinated about what her kids can be like in 11 years, I stored going again to her central promise at Theranos: The know-how that she invented would, in her phrases, create “a world in which no one ever has to say goodbye too soon.”
And there she was, getting ready to just do that.
That Friday, the couple had been on the brink of host a gaggle of buddies from the Bay Area. They invited me to remain. They repeatedly invited me to return again, to convey my household. We may all go to the zoo.
I appreciated their hospitality, however I did not totally perceive it. Usually interview topics cannot wait to do away with me.
Then I noticed why they stored opening the door wider. Holmes is not like anybody I’ve ever met – modest however mesmerizing. If you’re in her presence, it’s inconceivable to not imagine her, to not be taken along with her and be taken in by her. Liz Holmes and Billy Evans know that. I politely declined their invitation.
Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com