A photographer has recalled a photo shoot with convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes that he now suspects was all a charade.

Reacting to the intriguing and bizarre trailer for an upcoming Nathan Fielder documentary You Can See Everything, photographer Benjamin Rasmussen took to Instagram to spill the tea on his time photographing Holmes for Bloomberg Businessweek in 2015.

As Rasmussen explains, he met Holmes just as allegations had begun to surface that her company, Theranos, had falsely claimed to revolutionize blood testing using only a tiny sample.

“Holmes had always been shown as this Steve Jobs figure, complete with black turtleneck and a piercing gaze,” Rasmussen writes. “But as the cracks were beginning to show, her PR team decided they would reframe the story.”

“Theranos wasn’t just Holmes,” he continues. “It was this entire team of women scientists who came together to create this amazing technology.”

Rasmussen reveals to CNN that the Theranos PR team decreed that he was only allowed to shoot group portraits, all of them women scientists in lab coats.

“It was this really hard pivot to (show) this was a team effort,” he says. “When we walked into this space, we realized how much they were trying to control it.”

Even as Holmes was tried by a federal jury, eventually being convicted of defrauding investors in 2022 (she now resides at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas), Rasmussen did not tell his story until now.

He doesn’t reveal how long he had his doubts for, but insinuates to CNN that he suspects the entire photo shoot was a sham.

“It didn’t seem like a particularly controlled environment,” he recalls of the lab setting.

“You don’t kind of expect that the whole thing is a facade. In hindsight, it’s been like, wait a second, was this all a charade?”

Getting the Shot

Rasmussen says that he and his assistant Ryan Brown had a crisis meeting at the lab and decided that they were going to get the shot they came for, despite the Theranos PR team insisting that the team of women scientists should be in the shot as well.

“Ryan and I realized we could just use the white window shade as a backdrop. So we set up this whole scene with lights and different setups, a big show to please the PR,” he says on Instagram.

“We photographed friendly, corporate-looking scenes, then slowly moved Holmes back, closer and closer to the window. Ryan held up a huge reflector directly behind me to block the PR team’s view, and I kept giving super-specific direction to scientists who weren’t even vaguely in frame.”

Rasmussen got the shot he wanted: a head-and-shoulders shot of Holmes looking straight down the camera with a “look of quiet desperation” against a white backdrop.

The photographer says that he eventually received feedback from Theranos, which, unsurprisingly, “was not good.”

But he adds that even the PR team wouldn’t have known the full extent of the crisis Theranos was facing during the photo shoot.

“I think that the level to which everything crumbled, the only person in that room who knew how much it could fall apart was Elizabeth Holmes,” he says.

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Image creditsWikimedia Commons