her to charm and defraud them. As forensic psychia-
trists, we are often similarly empathic toward the
people we are interviewing who are in bad situations
of their own making.
In The Dropout, the protagonist had been told by
a female Stanford professor that her idea would not
work, as it was not based on science. She wanted to
invent a skin patch that would both detect infectious
disease and administer appropriate antibiotics. Her
company, Theranos, was a combination of two
words, “Therapy” and “Diagnosis.” Eventually, she
dropped the patch idea and established her company
to develop a small machine that would be able to run
hundreds of diagnostic tests from a single drop of
blood from a finger. She would not listen to anyone
who tried to tell her that this was physically impossi-
ble. When it began to come to light that her machine
(dubbed the Edison) did not work, she would retort
that people who doubted her and her technology
were trying to keep powerful women from advanc-
ing. In the Hulu Series, Amanda Seyfried, who
played Lilly Kane in Veronica Mars and played Karen
in the film Mean Girls, does an excellent job of
embodying the wide-eyed Elizabeth Holmes, who
for years allegedly artificially deepened her voice and
wore all black to imitate her idol, Steve Jobs of
Apple.
When Ms. Holmes’s character first runs into trou-
ble with her powerful board, she brings in Sonny
Balwani, an experienced businessman in the tech
world to become COO of Theranos. Mr. Balwani,
played in the Hulu Series by Naveen Andrews of the
popular television series Lost, changes the culture and
feel o f Theranos and, like Elizabeth Holmes, seems
more interested in the bottom line and selling ideas
than in actually implementing a working device that
could help patients. They developed an intimate rela-
tionship that was a secret, which became controversial
and, in the end, contentiou s. In later legal proceedings,
they chose to be tried separately. In the real world,
Elizabeth Holmes claimed that she was unduly influ-
enced and psychologically abused by Mr. Balwani,
who was eighteen years her senior and who she had
met when she was eighteen. Mr. Balwani’sreal-world
trial began while The Dropout was airing, causing sev-
eral potential jurors to be dismissed.
2
In the Dropout series, when people in the company
who realized that an unreliable, inaccurate machine
could harm patients attempted to speak to Mr.
Balwani or Ms. Holmes regarding their concerns, they
were met with anger and dismissal and were forced to
sign nondisclosure agreements. Despite these agree-
ments, a few brave people, including the grandson of
famous board member and supporter of Elizabeth
Holmes, George Shultz (played by Sam Waterston,
perhaps best known for his 16 seasons as Jack McCoy
on Law and Order) spoke up and became sources for
the reporter character John Carryrou. In the series,
employees were threatened and stalked in attempts to
intimidate them. Ian Gibbons (played by Stephen
Fry), the former lab director of Theranos, committed
suicide before he was to testify at a deposition involving
a patent lawsuit against the company. In the real world,
Carryrou wrote the Wall Street Journal article that first
broke the Theranos scandal.
3
He also wrote the novel
Bad Blood and created the podcast of the same name
as the series.
In these two recent miniseries, the protagonists
Anna Sorokin, a self-proclaimed German heiress liv-
ing in posh New York City hotels, and Elizabe th
Holmes, founder and CEO of Thera nos, are both
strong, compelling, motivated young white women
characters. Both series depict how these women were
able to fool powerful people into investing money
and time in them through their artful capacity to con-
vincingly sell others on their own stories of future suc-
cess as if they were already successful. While many
young, accomplished women struggle with “Impos ter
Syndrome,” Ms. Sorokin and Ms. Holmes seemed to
have the opposite problem, abundant confidence
with no credentials to support it. Ms. Holmes
dropped out of Stanford after her freshman year, and
Anna Sorokin (who also went by Anna Delvey) was
not the heiress she claimed to b e but hailed from
Russia and later Germany where she and her family
lacked means, and she was teased mercilessly by her
peers. Ms. Holmes’sstory,astoldthroughThe
Dropout, also portrays early childhood teasing and a
history of a sexual assault at Stanford.
Both the portrayals of the protag onists in Inventing
Anna and The Dropout share similar traits with young
womenseeninfictionwhohavepsychopathictraits
as described by Cerny et al.
4
In shows like Pretty
Little Liars and Gossip Girl, girls portray characteris-
tics such as lying and bullying to get ahead while of-
ten remaining charming to the outside world. They
and other such characters served to normalize “bad
behavior in young women”(Ref.4,p233).Boththe
Anna and Elizabeth characters have an idea that they
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Volume 50, Number 3, 2022 491
