ABC News’ The Dropout podcast about the downfall of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes led to Hulu’s Emmy-winning miniseries The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes — a role Seyfried reprises in the blockbuster new documentary You Can See Everything. Now, things have come full circle, with Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim‘s buzzy fly-on-the-wall feature film prompting a new episode of the podcast that started it all.
Erika Cheung, a whistleblower prominently featured on the true-crime podcast, which originally ran across 30 episodes from 2019 to 2022, returned this week for a new installment to discuss You Can See Everything.
Cheung joined Theranos fresh out of college and became so disenchanted with the company that she helped expose its fraud. As she told podcast host Rebecca Jarvis, Cheung was interested in seeing the film and how it portrayed her former boss.
“When I think about this case and I reflect on what happened, there’s no simulation that I think about where this could have ended in a good place. So there is and was even some curiosity on my part of, well, ‘what was she thinking?’ What was going inside her head? Because there’s no way that I could really predict or empathize with how she thought this may have led to something good,” she says of her former boss.
While Cheung says the documentary is revealing, she believes it doesn’t capture the full picture of who Holmes is or what it was like to work under her leadership.
“People don’t realize the amount of retaliatory behavior that Holmes exhibited. And it’s very hard if you weren’t there and you didn’t see it firsthand of how many people were fired, how many people were screamed at, how many people were threatened to lose their jobs. And that was the same case for me. For me, coming forward and sharing my concerns about what was happening with patient testing, I thought this was me doing my job.”
Cheung did praise Fielder and Oppenheim for creating a sense of what she describes as “unsettlingness.”
“I think it was a remarkable job that Lance and Nathan did in making us all realize how vulnerable we are to being deceived by what people say,” she says. “I think Holmes has always been remarkably good at saying things that make you believe her, that make you empathize with her, that make you be inspired by her. But when you really start to get into the details of the way she behaves and the way she treats people, it paints a whole different narrative. And so I think Lance and Nathan and that whole team, they deserve their flowers.”
Despite recognizing the documentary’s impact, Cheung worries that Holmes may not have learned from her past mistakes.
“Doing a documentary like this, starting a new business in the same fields, doing these types of things, it’s not suggestive to me that this person has really learned from their mistakes or can even have the humility to admit that they made some.”
As Gold Derby previously reported, the popularity of You Can See Everything has sparked renewed interested in media related to Holmes, including a more than 600% increase in streams for The Dropout podcast.
