Plus, now she’ll have to do this voice for the rest of her life (?), and it’s all I can think about. The internet’s reaction to the podcast, and to Bad Blood, John Carreyrou’s book about Theranos, suggests I’m not alone.
Holmes is obviously guilty of many more serious crimes, but faking one’s voice is just weird, and embarrassing, in much the same way that bad toupees are: they place one’s bodily insecurities center stage. This, of course, only makes me more interested. If you hunt around online, you can sometimes find YouTube videos in which Holmes can be heard using that real voice before catching herself and deepening it, but these videos have a tendency to be taken down after a day or two. She pauses, and then, in the same deep mumble, recites: “Do or do not, there is no try.”
The cameraman then asks her to do Yoda’s voice, and for a moment, I held my breath. There is a moment in which the camera person filming Holmes for an earlier interview segment asks her what her favorite Star Wars sound is (?), and she says Yoda. In the new Theranos HBO documentary, “The Inventor,” Holmes’ baritone is on full, strange display.
(Holmes’s family recently denied these claims to TMZ, insisting her voice is naturally low, just like her grandmother’s.) Former co-workers of Holmes told The Dropout, a new podcast about Theranos’s downfall, that Holmes occasionally “fell out of character” and exposed her real, higher voice - particularly after drinking. Holmes, the ousted Theranos founder who was indicted last year on federal fraud charges for hawking an essentially imaginary product to multi-millionaire investors, pharmacies, and hospitals, speaks in a deep baritone that, as it turns out, is allegedly fake. There are many fascinating, upsetting details in the story of Elizabeth Holmes, but my favorite is her voice.