‘Was this all a charade?’: A photographer’s strange day with Elizabeth Holmes

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — When Benjamin Rasmussen arrived at Theranos’ headquarters in Palo Alto, California, to photograph Elizabeth Holmes in 2015, he wasn’t anticipating an unusual day. He was on assignment for Bloomberg Businessweek, for a cover story that was Holmes’ opportunity to respond to the bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation that first cast suspicion on her seemingly radical health-tech company. She was still years away from being charged and convicted for criminal fraud for claiming Theranos’ device could diagnose a spate of diseases with a finger blood draw, and, before her downfall,

Holmes was often photographed like a genius leader: heroic gaze, brightly illuminated face, stark black turtleneck. But Rasmussen and his assistant, Ryan Brown flew out with the directive to take simple portraits of her on a white backdrop, to try and get at the real her. What he got was much stranger.

In one of the images, Holmes stands stiffly in the foreground against long tables filled with equipment, wearing a pristine white lab coat over her signature dark turtleneck. She looks blankly off to the side as three scientists perform tasks behind her. When Rasmussen entered Theranos, he was directed toward this room, and it soon became clear that he was up against a PR team in crisis mode, he recalled. The decree was group portraits only — none of Holmes alone — with a very specific handful of people who were participating in the shoot.

“It was all women scientists,” he said. “It was this really hard pivot to (show) this was a team effort.”

Rasmussen is used to photographing celebrities, politicians and CEOs in restrictive situations where he has very few chances to reveal something genuine. After all, public figures are used to performing in front of the camera. To strip away the mask and let the real person emerge means creating a certain level of comfort for the subject and a sense of openness in the room, he said. Here, that wasn’t possible.

“When we walked into this space, we realized how much they were trying to control it,” he said. “You essentially have a whole series of directors who are trying to make sure that that character stays in place.”

Enough time has passed now for Rasmussen to share details from the day, which he called “unsettling.” Following cringe comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder’s recent surprise (and very tense) 1-minute trailer for a documentary he filmed with Holmes in the days before she began serving her 11-year sentence (releasing October 16), Rasmussen detailed his own experience to his followers on Instagram. But for more than a decade, as she was charged and put on trial — and even played by Amanda Seyfried in a Hulu rise-and-fall biopic — Rasmussen kept the images and story to himself, even though he had offers to license the images.

“I thought it was one thing for this to sort of exist in critical journalism circles, but it didn’t feel right,” he explained. “Her life is torn up enough from the decisions that she made, and I don’t particularly want to be part of like a broader kind of cultural shaming process of a person.”

Still, he explained, he looks back on the shoot and wonders what was authentic. He said he was given no information about the other women in the shoot, and the room they were in was messy and stacked high with cardboard boxes. The lab coat over the turtleneck seemed to him like a message about scientific rigor.

But for a lab setting, he recalled, “it didn’t seem like a particularly controlled environment.” He compared it to a shoot he did in a hospital setting for a story on its experimental treatments, where there were sterile rooms and gear checks and double-glove requirements. At Theranos, someone only warned them to wash their hands because of the “nasty stuff” in the room, he remembered. That stood out to him clearly in his mind because hours later, his assistant, Brown, was vomiting violently out of the car window on the way back to the airport. They still do not know whether to credit that to the sushi burritos they had for lunch or some other unknown variable.

Either way, Rasmussen jokes that it was karmic retribution for how they handled the shoot. Faced with the publicity team’s rules, he and his assistant had their own private crisis meeting and decided they were still going to try and get the cover shot. Told they couldn’t set up their white seamless background, they instead pulled the window blinds down and lit the room accordingly without sharing their plans. Over the course of the 20 minutes they had with Holmes, they shot group portraits and portraits of her interacting with the scientists, but slowly nudged her further down the tables toward the blinds and away from her colleagues. Brown popped up a reflector to hide their maneuvers, and they kept providing direction to the other scientists, who were no longer in frame. Eventually, they had enough space for Rasmussen to fire off a handful of standalone portraits for the cover (the eventual feedback from Theranos, he said, was not good.)

Looking back, Rasmussen said he’s used to working with internal teams who are focused on their own corporate messaging, who want to present a glossy view versus a critical gaze. But this shoot had him questioning, well, everything.

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

He thinks back to her demeanor, too, and wonders how she was feeling. She didn’t strike him as having a magnetism or a sense of command over the room. In many of the images, she has a deer-in-headlights expression, which he said is how it felt.

“She felt more like a character who was playing Elizabeth Holmes and less like this CEO, youngest self-made billionaire,” he said. (That same year, Forbes had named her as the youngest self-made female billionaire for the company’s $9 billion valuation).

At the time, there was no way for him to guess that it was the beginning of the end of Theranos. He filed the shoot away as a strange day and moved on until 2018, when she was arrested and charged, and then the puzzle pieces of the day began to click into place.

“I don’t know that in the moment I realized how much she had at stake,” he recalled. “The PR people didn’t know the extent of any of that as well, right? 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.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.