Convicted Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes said that Amanda Seyfried didn’t play her in the Hulu series “The Dropout” but instead played a “character” that she created.
Holmes, who is due to begin serving an 11-year prison sentence after she was found guilty of defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars, was featured in a controversial profile by The New York Times, whose writer, Amy Chozick, was accused of offering a sympathetic portrayal of a convicted criminal.
When Chozick brought up Seyfried’s portrayal of Holmes in the Hulu series as well as the rumor that Jennifer Lawrence pulled out of playing her in the film “Bad Blood,” Holmes told her: “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”
Holmes told The Times that she created a public persona because she “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 technical ideas.”
“Maye people picked up on that not being authentic since it wasn’t,” Holmes said.
Holmes told the Times that she preferred to be known as “Liz” rather than “Elizabeth.”
Social media users were angered over the weekend by Chozick’s 5,200-word feature, which mentions Holmes’ penchant for avoiding R-rated movies and her volunteering at a rape crisis hotline.
“I was admittedly swept up in Liz as an authentic and sympathetic person,” Chozick wrote in the piece. “She’s gentle and charismatic, in a quiet way.”
Chozick added: “If you are in her presence, it is impossible not to believe her, not to be taken with her and be taken in by her.”
The Times story triggered an online backlash.
“Maybe this article would have been served more by a discussion of sociopaths,” tweeted political commentator Matthew Dowd.
“Nice to be a pretty white lady working your charm on a nyt reporter,” tweeted former CNN host Soledad O’Brien, who lashed out at Chozick as “consistently crappy.”
Scott Budman, a journalist who covered the Theranos trial, wrote on Twitter: “The last line of the New York Times story is wrong.”
“It is possible to be in her presence and not completely believe her. Questioning is what we do for a living,” he wrote.
Another Twitter user wrote: “For every glowing puff piece you see trying to rehabilitate Elizabeth Holmes’s image, i want you to remember something… she personally approved a 15 month clinical trial using a device she knew to be useless, to measure cancer drug levels in the blood of terminal cancer patients.”
Twitter user Sean Tuffy tweeted: “Ladies, get yourself a man who loves you as much as the NYT loves rehabilitating the reputation of white collar criminals.”
Holmes, who currently remains free on bail, was scheduled to begin her prison sentence on April 27, but a last-minute appeal filed by her lawyers delayed the start of her incarceration.
Federal prosecutors have 10 days to respond to the filing by Holmes’ attorneys contesting the federal judge’s order to start serving her sentence.
Holmes was found her guilty on four charges relating to defrauding investors last year. She was acquitted on charges of defrauding patients who took Theranos blood tests.
Holmes’ downfall was triggered by a Wall Street Journal investigation which revealed that Theranos’ blood tests could not perform many of the functions she claimed.