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An Elizabeth Holmes documentary is coming out next month.
Filmed in the 34 days before she reported to federal prison to begin her 11 year sentence (back in May 2023), it screened at the Telluride Film Festival a few days ago.
Theranos was one of the most spectacular frauds of the century. Founding the company at 19, Elizabeth Holmes managed to secure investment from very powerful investors and seemed to be on track to revolutionize healthcare, until whistleblowers and investigative journalists reported massive fraud that resulted in her conviction and sentencing.
Behavior Profilers on Holmes
If you listen to behavior profilers review Holmes’ interviews, they focus on her characteristic head nod, blink rate, stop gestures, body position. Many consider these mannerisms to be indicators of deception, narcissism, or both.
Body language analysis can identify potentially meaningful deviations from baseline as well as debatable signals of deception, but body language signals are deeply influenced by context, culture, and idiosyncrasies in a way that cannot be precisely defined. For these reasons, profilers stress that this sort of behavioral profiling is more art than science.
What behavioral profilers largely gloss over, however, are verbal behaviors, the study of which is an actual science. It accounts for culture, and most importantly context. Profilers are limited in their ability to apply this science; they’ll note shifts between singular and plural (“I” v. “we”) or instances of “chaff and redirect” 1, but not much else.
CEOs or Criminals?
Most profilers will readily admit that Elizabeth Holmes’ body language doesn’t appear meaningfully different from that of many other highly successful CEOs. But not all highly successful CEOs are indicted for wire fraud.
Turns out that, for Holmes, a better sampling frame is not CEOs but… criminals.
Analyzing speech in this population provided a test environment to explore how patterns of question answering can actually differentiate “good” from “bad” faith — in other words, potential to recommit crimes (i.e., reoffend) or not.
Given reports that Holmes is planning a post-prison return to the biotech industry, this is all the more interesting. Do Elizabeth Holmes’ verbal answering patterns align with repeat criminal offenders?
The short answer is… yes.
Rejoinders and re-offense?
Reoffenders less frequently accept the proposition of the question, rejecting it at a rate over double those who do not reoffend (12.64% v 5.88%, respectively), and a level of statistical significance. Straightaway, these numbers position Holmes closer to the “reoffender” population.
We examined the speech of hundreds of convicted felons pre-release and then tracked their release outcomes. We taxonomized and analyzed verbal behaviors. Recurrent use of certain question response types correlated with reoffense, at a level of statistical significance — even when accounting for elicitation strategies and demographics2. These response types are broadly classed as rejoinders. In law, rejoinders are defendants’ formal answer to a plaintiff's reply during court pleadings. Colloquially, rejoinders are responses to questions, and classed as direct or indirect.
A direct rejoinder is a simple answer (i.e., yes, no, or providing simply the information requested in a WH-question). Criminals who do not reoffend use direct rejoinders in 72.35% of instances. Compare this to reoffenders’ 46.12%. Ask yourself how often Elizabeth Holmes answered questions straightforwardly, without elaboration…. [for example, view this clip at 1:17:15]
Indirect Rejoinders
What you hear in the clip above is indirect rejoinder. Reoffenders use indirect rejoinders more commonly than direct rejoinders (in absolute terms), and are nearly twice as likely to utilize indirect rejoinders than those who do not reoffend (53.88% v. 27.64%, respectively). Indirect rejoinders fall into three subcategories: disclaimers, supplementary response, and commentary, none of which answer the question directly — that’s the point. 3
Disclaimer
In the documentary trailer above, every statement Elizabeth Holmes makes in response to a question is a disclaiming indirect rejoinder. Her answers deny the relevance or challenge the premise of the question, declaring an inability or unwillingness to answer directly. This is a strong flag, as reoffenders reply with a disclaimer nearly four times more frequently than those who do not reoffend.
Commentary
In her interviews before 2018, Holmes commonly relied on another form of indirect rejoinder, commentary. Commentary describes the speaker’s attitude toward the questions being asked instead of answering. At the infamous Jonathan Krim WSJ interview in 2016, Holmes retorted, “So I have several answers to this. I mean, first, I am never going to get on stage and make comments about what the FDA thinks because it’s not my place to do that.” This refusal to comment is (in this instance, ironically) referred to as an indirect commentary rejoinder.
Supplementary
The most common of the three indirect rejoinder types among reoffenders is supplementary response, also the form that Holmes most frequently uses. Supplementary responses provide extra information that implies an answer without actually stating it. For instance, “Well they haven’t said that to us…. Well, we’re talking with them.” One could argue this is a CEO’s PR training — but very few criminals have the benefit of PR training, and this is the strategy the reoffenders among them use most commonly.
Takeaway
These verbal behaviors are not elaborate, complicated, or particularly remarkable. They’re basic — what makes them interesting is the extent to which they neatly divide a criminal population by those who recommit crimes and those who do not, and how neatly they situate Holmes.
But if you’re thinking that this analysis would suggest most founders or CEOs are criminals, then consider this:
The bottom line: When Holmes is released from federal prison in 2030, these prior verbal behaviors point to a heightened behavioral risk on release.
We’ll see… but first the documentary.
1 Chaff, like a military aircraft under missile attack releases pieces of metal or aluminum decoys to trick the missile into chasing debris rather than the plane.
2 Of course the questions themselves have bearing on responses. Every question demands a relevant response, and the restrictions of relevance are set by the question. So we explored the extent to which the interviewers’ questions and elicitation strategies influence the results. Within the sample we balanced the elicitation strategies between populations, so that the questions themselves would not restrict either population’s use of rejoinders.
3 These questions seek confirmation of the facts in the inmate’s record (e.g., prison behavioral reports, vocational and educational certificates, official account of the crime). Though the source of these questions is official records, the recidivist pushes back, though the (often contradicting) facts are in evidence.