Elizabeth Holmes' Husband Billy Evans: The Trial, Prison & Nathan Fielder's Documentary

The conversation opens with news-style framing. Elizabeth Holmes is described as a tech CEO turned convicted felon at the center of a large, multi-year fraud tied to her failed blood-testing startup, Theranos. She was sentenced to 11 and a quarter years in prison on four counts of criminal fraud. Billy Evans is introduced as her fiancé and partner, and as a subject of a forthcoming documentary, You Can See Everything. The couple first connected while federal authorities were investigating her for fraud and conspiracy.

The guest says it is his first interview of any kind and introduces himself on his own terms: "my name is Billy Evans. And yes, Elizabeth Holmes is my wife and best friend and partner." Being introduced simply as Holmes's husband is described as "typically not how I love to be introduced."

The interview grew out of a party about a year and a half earlier, around F1. Evans approached the host and said the host's podcast talked about his wife a lot and had "a lot of the story pretty fundamentally wrong," and offered to share more details. That led to phone calls and then a trip to Texas, where the host spent a day visiting Holmes in prison with Evans, her parents and the children. The host concluded that "there was a lot more to this story than what I think had been portrayed." The conversation also notes that the documentary had been a well-kept secret in Hollywood that had since leaked.

The discussion sets a ground rule early: it will not litigate the Theranos case, which is described as "Elizabeth's story to tell when the time is right." The stated reason for her long public silence is that she was under a gag order from the start of the Department of Justice investigation through the trial and appeals, ending "last April." Holmes is described as someone who "follows rules maniacally," so when the judge said the case would be litigated in the courtroom and not in the media, she never spoke to the press, even as articles, movies and podcasts about her multiplied.

This framing is a limitation for readers to keep in mind. Nearly everything that follows is one partisan account, offered by her spouse, with almost no opposing evidence presented on stage. The "gag order" description is also later qualified: "technically it was not a gag order."

According to this account, Evans and Holmes met at a Fleet Week party in San Francisco, on the roof of a venture capitalist who "was trying to hire me and date her." Evans had planned to stop by for about five minutes, since he was hosting a party for 100 people at a house he shared with four other men. He was reminded of the event while out buying ice, parked in the red, and was introduced to Holmes minutes after arriving. The two talked for roughly two and a half to three hours, and Evans calls it the start of "a conversation that really has never ended."

What stood out to Evans was her attention and curiosity. She listened, made people feel "so seen," and watched the planes overhead "with this childlike wonder." At first Evans did not know who she was. She wore a big floppy hat and dark sunglasses and had a band-aid on her face because her husky puppy had scratched her. The realization came when they compared workplaces on Page Mill Road: his office was at 1891 and hers was at roughly 1790, two doors down.

The date was October 7, 2017. The conversation places it after the DOJ investigation began but before the indictment, when what the transcript renders as "the Carrey U article machine" had already produced around a hundred critical pieces and given her a "horrible reputation" as a fraudster.

And those two things were so radically different from one another. Yeah, it was really challenging.