Is Elizabeth Holmes's Deep Voice Just Another Part of Her Scam?
The new documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley chronicles the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, the now-disgraced biotech entrepreneur and founder of Theranos, who promised a revolutionary advancement in medical testing, but never actually developed said technology.
Holmes is now facing up to 20 years in prison, and is currently awaiting a criminal trial for fraud. She pleaded not guilty on the charges.
One of Holmes's more unusual traits, which is illustrated in the film, is her rough, deep voice, which some say she faked. Here, we look into those claims.
In watching clips of Elizabeth Holmes, the now-disgraced founder of Theranos who is currently awaiting trial for fraud charges, two things immediately stand out. First, her consistent aesthetic: the one-time biotech entrepreneur was rarely seen wearing anything other than a black turtleneck, a look some claim was directly inspired by her obsession with Steve Jobs and his iconic uniform dressing.
The second notable trait is her unexpectedly deep voice.
A woman with a natural baritone voice like Holmes's is certainly not out of the realm of possibility. But in the aftermath of the Theranos scandal, several people who knew Holmes claim the pitch of her voice was yes another aspect of her fraud.
“When she came to me she didn’t have a low voice," Dr. Phyllis Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford who interacted with Holmes during her freshman year of college, told ABC's Rebecca Jarvis on "The Dropout" podcast, a program centered around Holmes and her scam. "When I next saw her again was at the Harvard Medical School board meeting where she was being introduced. She says with this low voice and I’m like, 'Oh my god.' It was quite off."
Ana Arriola, a former Theranos employee, also told the podcast that she heard Holmes "fall out of voice," notably in social situations. "It was maybe at one of the company parties, and maybe she had too much to drink or what not, but she fell out of character and exposed that that was not necessarily her true voice," Arriola said. "Maybe she needed to be more convincing to project a persona within a room among male VCs I'm not really quite sure."
Reporter John Carreyrou, who broke open the Theranos scandal and would eventually go on to write the book Bad Blood about Holmes, says he also has sources who claim to have heard her break character.
"An employee who joined the company in 2011 had a meeting with her shortly after he joined, and it was late in the day and they were finishing up the meeting and she sort of expressed her excitement that he had recently joined," Carreyrou told Norah O'Donnell, according to the Daily Mail.
"And as she got up, she forgot to put on the baritone and slipped back into a more natural-sounding young woman's voice."
Holmes's family has told TMZ that her voice is "naturally low," and that it runs in the family.
"We're told most people in the fam have low voices, including her grandmother," TMZ reports, "and Elizabeth will occasionally change her pitch to a higher octave -- especially when she gets excited or passionate."
So why would Holmes put on a voice?
Given Holmes's penchant for deceit, perhaps speaking in a lower octave was just another part of her deception. But her deep voice could also stem from a desire to be taken seriously as a women in a male-dominated field.
As Megan Garber summarized in the Atlantic, scientific research has shown that humans perceive a deeper voice to indicate trustworthiness, attractiveness, competency, and strength in both men and women.
Researchers from Duke and the University of Miami have also found that "voters naturally seem to prefer candidates with deeper voices, which they associate with strength and competence more than age."
While she isn't a politician, it isn't too far a leap of logic to guess that Holmes thought a deeper voice could lend her credibility as a young, female CEO, credibility she didn't deserve.
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