Elizabeth Holmes' Husband Billy Evans: The Trial, Prison & Nathan Fielder's Documentary

Billy Evans says he met Elizabeth Holmes at a Fleet Week party in San Francisco on October 7, 2017, after critical Theranos coverage had begun but before her indictment. They were friends for six months before dating; Holmes was indicted about three weeks into their relationship. Evans says the woman he knew differed sharply from her public portrayal. Before the indictment, he says, Holmes had been told she would not be charged and believed she had done nothing wrong. As trial approached, she spent long hours with lawyers reviewing hundreds of thousands of records, and they were confident she would win.

Holmes was convicted of defrauding three investors and conspiracy, and sentenced to 135 months, or 11¼ years. Evans emphasizes that she was acquitted on patient-fraud counts involving four patients, which he says were not statistically significant against the approximately 12.5 million patient tests he says Theranos ran over 18 months. He also says Walgreens’ planned rollout across about 800 stores involved contractual obligations and stopped after negative press, including John Carreyrou’s article. Evans says the judge did not technically impose a gag order, but directed the trial team to let the case play out in court rather than the press. Holmes stayed quiet to avoid jeopardizing the process, he says, but he considers that silence her biggest mistake because he believes her strength was telling her story. He says he will not litigate the case for her and considers it hers to tell.

The trial was delayed during COVID, and Evans says their son was three months old when it began. Born on July 10, 2020, the boy was still an infant as Holmes pumped milk during court breaks. Evans says jurors did not know she had recently given birth because she was determined not to appear vulnerable. Holmes later reported to Bryan Federal Prison Camp in College Station, Texas. At the time of the conversation, Evans said she had spent 1,205 days there, among about 800 women. The family kept their children away when she entered prison because they expected the goodbye to be too emotional; their son was then 22 months old. Evans says he is raising their two children while building a business and trying to get Holmes released, and that they answer the children truthfully when they ask about their mother.

Evans says Holmes can earn 16 days off her sentence for every 30 days in prison by participating in programming. After a recent one-year reduction following changes to sentencing guidelines, he expected she could reach a halfway house in the second quarter of the following year. He also says 70% of money sent to Holmes for commissary is taken toward her $435 million victim-restitution obligation. In his account, less than $100 million of the restitution relates to 10 investors he believes were added through a conspiracy charge, despite Holmes not being convicted of defrauding them. Evans argues that counting those investors increased the loss amount and brought the case to 10 or more victims, raising the sentence from roughly four and a half or five years to 11. He says the government argued during her sentence-reduction process that there was no evidence the investors who lost money had suffered financial hardship.

The forthcoming documentary You Can See Everything was intended, Evans says, to show Holmes as a person and let viewers make up their own minds, rather than relitigate Theranos. Because Holmes could not speak publicly at the time, the planned focus was their personal lives. Evans says they filmed with Nathan Fielder and Lance before Holmes reported to prison. The project took three years, although filming was expected to wrap within a year; Evans had not seen the documentary and could not say how it turned out. He describes the prison as having about 800 residents and perhaps 30 visitors on a typical weekend.

Evans previously helped build Luminar, which developed LiDAR for autonomous vehicles using lasers. His company, Hamantas, is developing biological sensors using Raman spectroscopy: light is passed through samples, and the resulting scattering is interpreted to identify chemical structures. Evans says existing Raman devices can cost millions of dollars, stretch many feet in length, and be difficult to use; Hamantas aims to make the technology cheaper and more widely distributed. The company also aims to build rich biological datasets for AI to identify correlations among disparate signals. Evans rejects press portrayals of the business as “Theranos 2.0.”