Elizabeth Holmes spent her final weeks of freedom in 2023 doing something nobody expected: letting a camera crew follow her and her partner, Billy Evans, into their rented beach house near San Diego. The result is a three-hour documentary called “You Can See Everything,” which the disgraced Theranos founder is now promoting even as she serves an 11-year federal prison sentence for fraud. In it, when filmmaker Nathan Fielder presses her on whether she is being sincere, Holmes answers flatly: “I’m always being real.”
The film premiered in secret on September 6, 2026, during an unannounced screening at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, where attendees had to lock up their phones before distributor A24 revealed an October 16 theatrical release date, according to the Los Angeles Times. As reported by the Mercury News, Holmes and Evans allowed the crew to film them before she reported to prison in May 2023, hoping, in Holmes’ own words, to clear her name. Per Deadline’s Pete Hammond, the screening itself was held in secret and offered an unprecedented level of access to a subject rarely seen on camera in such an unguarded way.
A Three-Hour Interrogation of Sincerity
Co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the 174-minute film was three years in the making and weaves elaborate reenactments alongside an appearance by actress Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing Holmes in the Hulu dramatization “The Dropout,” according to Roger Ebert. Fielder takes a central role in the film, serving as Holmes’ main interrogator across long, unresolved conversations, per the Mercury News. He reportedly told the New York Times that his interactions with Holmes and Evans became strange and unnerving, even though he had initially planned to remain behind the camera with Oppenheim.
Times reporter Nicole Sperling said Fielder gained access to moments many would consider off limits, and also reported that Holmes and Evans plan to launch a new and improved version of Theranos, per the Mercury News account. Variety critic Owen Gleiberman has said the film is not a pure documentary, and it is driven by inquiry rather than simply recording events. Holmes did not participate in earlier books, podcasts, or documentaries about her case, nor in “The Dropout” series itself. She did, however, sit for an interview with the New York Times before sentencing, making this film a further direct engagement with the media apparatus built around her downfall.
“I’m Not That Person, I Can Promise You That”
Inside the film, Holmes maintains her innocence and denies that her Theranos blood-testing venture was ever illegitimate. “I don’t have anything to deceive you on. I’m engaging with you as a human being,” she tells Fielder at one point, according to the Mercury News. Pressed further, she adds: “I’m not that person, I can promise you that.” The film also touches on her family life during that period — Evans, an heir to a luxury-hotel chain, and Holmes had a daughter, Invicta, born a couple of months before Holmes reported to prison, and a son, William, who was 20 months old at the time.
The Legal Reality Behind the Cameras
Whatever the documentary’s ambiguities about sincerity, the underlying legal facts are settled. A federal jury in San Jose convicted Holmes, a Stanford dropout once celebrated as the youngest self-made female billionaire, on four felony fraud counts in 2022, and Theranos itself collapsed in 2015 after the Wall Street Journal exposed its deceptive blood-testing claims. The company had raised approximately $945 million from investors including Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison and reached a peak private valuation of $9 billion, according to Roger Ebert. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office's Nov. 30, 2020, report GAO-21-191, most laboratories that perform testing on humans are required to meet certain federal requirements under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement ... According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the objective of CLIA is to ensure quality laboratory testing, and Congress passed CLIA regulations in 1988 to establish quality standards for all ... According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ 2025 Laboratory Registry Report, federal records list laboratories whose CLIA certificates have been suspended, limited, or revoked, along with the reasons for those adverse actions.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed both Holmes’ and former Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani’s convictions and sentences in February 2025, then denied a request for en banc rehearing that May, according to CBS News. Balwani, convicted on 12 felony counts in July 2022, is separately serving nearly 13 years at FCI Lompoc II in California, per the Department of Justice. U.S. District Judge Edward Davila also ordered Holmes and Balwani to pay $452 million in restitution, jointly and severally, including $397 million to twelve primary victims and $54.5 million to corporate partners Walgreens and Safeway, according to Courthouse News Service. Federal prosecutors have separately asked that Holmes pay at least $250 a month toward that debt once she leaves prison, per PBS News.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, a Silicon Valley executive identified as Schena was sentenced on Oct. 18, 2023, in what prosecutors described as the first criminal securities-fraud case related to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, a Silicon Valley start-up founder was sentenced to 18 months on Apr. 19, 2024, after being charged with wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering.
Bay Area Ties and a Prison Sentence Still Playing Out
Holmes is currently serving her sentence at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas, per Britannica. She is barred from internet or social-media access from prison under Bureau of Prisons rules, though Hoodline previously reported on her account, which says posts are made by others.
According to Joint Venture Silicon Valley's 2026 Silicon Valley Index, venture deals in 2025 were concentrated in AI companies and included multiple billion-dollar rounds across Silicon Valley and San Francisco, while the region recorded $92 billion in venture capital and more than 23,000 new ...
The article also turns to Bay Area property. Whether “You Can See Everything” changes public perception of Holmes or simply extends the theatrics that first built and then unraveled Theranos remains, per the film’s own framing, an open question — one that a courtroom in San Jose already answered in far less ambiguous terms.
