Previously on The Dropout, we met Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford dropout with less than two years of college under her belt, who launched her blood testing company Theranos at just 19 years old. Obsessed with Apple and Steve Jobs, she'd started wearing black turtlenecks and recruiting heavily from her heroes company. But one by one, those Apple recruits, including Avi Tivanian, Steve Jobs' right hand guy, had been dropping like flies. So you were done with Theranos.
I had seen so many things that were bad go on. I would never expect anyone would behave the way that she behaved as a CEO. And believe me. I worked for Steve Jobs. I saw some crazy things. The business was also running out of cash. But Elizabeth was about to find a solution to all of those problems. From ABC Radio and Nightline, this is The Dropout. Episode 2 The Enforcer In 2009, Elizabeth Holmes found herself in a precarious place. Her company was now a few years old.
She had an office and employees, even though many of the Apple recruits had left. And a big mission to fulfill. What Elizabeth didn't have was the money to make it happen. She says she was considering at this point going out and doing an equity raise, essentially trying to find new investors to buy into her company. The trouble with that was timing. This was in the midst of the great recession.
Even companies that had been around for generations were struggling to get loans, and many were going out of business. It was something I was covering regularly for CNBC, like the day Lehman Brothers went under. I would stand the test of time through two world wars, through the great depression, and that now a credit crisis has brought it to its knees. But unlike so many others, Elizabeth had an ace up her sleeve. A white knight with deep pockets.
So a company was low on the cash, and I knew this mission, and what the company was trying to do was paramount. So I offered to help the company, and I ended up giving a $13 million dollar personal loan. And it was interest-free. It was a good faith loan. That's Ramesh Balwani. He goes by sunny. He's a former software executive who sold his company just before the.com bubble burst and made millions. He'd worked at Lotus and Microsoft. And in mid-2009, he cut Theranos a massive check.
But sunny wasn't just offering a lifeline. He was also joining Theranos as an employee. After that six months later, when I had decided that I'm going to stay here for the long term and board said, absolutely, you must. They made me the president and CEO. And did you have any qualifications in the lab testing business? You did not. Or in pathology or anything like that? Not to acknowledge. So sunny begins showing up to work every day at Theranos.
Like Elizabeth, sunny had his own kind of uniform, a white button-down shirt, jeans, and expensive loafers. He always smelled of cologne and became known for his flashy tastes. Sunny drove two cars, both with vanity plates, a black Lamborghini with license Vita Vici, as in Vaini Viti Vici, a reference to Julius Caesar's I came I saw I conquered, and a Porsche 911 with plates that Pedro Majd Karl Marx, his anti-capitalist manifesto, DOS Capital.
He was a very striking figure around the office, but his presence confused a lot of employees, like Michael Craig, a senior software engineer. I always wondered why he was there. If she had this vision of really impacting the world, I was like, why did she pick him then? He'll report it directly to Sunny. He was terse, and he was a bit of a hothead from what I could see. There was one level, this need to assert dominance, and another level, I don't think he ran terribly deep.
For instance, I remember at one company party, he had these set of samurai swords in his office for a long time. I finally was like, what's your interest in those swords and stuff? Pretty interested in a lot of that stuff. He basically said that it was just a thing. I was like, whoa, there's not even the story there. There's just some object that you just put there. He has that need to prove himself and also pretending like he's above everything.
Sunny became the most important person at the company after Elizabeth. These remember they would frequently see the two conducting meetings in their big windowed office at the end of the hallway. The two were a tag team. Elizabeth would focus on the board and big picture ideas, while Sunny, despite his lack of scientific experience, would manage the day-to-day with employees and business partners.
I would generally do the first meeting or two and talk about the vision, and then he would follow up on any questions that they had from a diligence perspective and provide them with that information. And Sunny wasn't afraid to get involved in the lab. Again, he had no real scientific training, but he would come in, roll up his white button down shirt sleeves, and start working. When there was shortage of people on weekends and I was okay, train me, I'll do it. And you wonder how to do all that?
Life in a startup, right? Sunny was a hard worker, but employees say he was also developing a reputation as a bully, someone with a menacing presence. There's Erica Chung, who worked for him in the lab. Initially, he would be fairly nice, but then through email, he frequently would get really upset about different things.
And it was like, this is unacceptable, or you guys don't know what you're doing, was always sort of firing back at people and blaming people for different things that were going on and was always unsatisfied with what people were doing and how they were doing it. And it got to a point where it was almost hard to work for him because he would just get so angry and get so upset and was not very well versed in the medical diagnostic world and wasn't really well versed in the sciences.
So would frequently say things that were just inappropriate and became very clear to the entire department, so that he didn't understand really what was going on. Tyler Schultz, another colleague of Erica's, says Sunny earned a nickname around the office. It was just pretty well known that Sunny was kind of the enforcer of what. Of kind of like the intimidation tactics, yes. According to former employees, Sunny's management style caused many people to leave the company.
Again, here's Michael Craig. Did he ever get angry with you? Just asking me to do something out of the blue and then looking at whatever I did, which generally speaking, I poured my heart into and then be like, oh, this is not at all what I asked for, you know, and like, you're like, what? Would he yell? I mean, he was loud. It's like barking at people, basically. And even Elizabeth, under oath, tried to distance herself from this behavior. Were there areas in which you disagreed?
Yes. What were those areas? And we disagreed all the time about a lot of things. We're very different leadership styles. So what was keeping this millionaire with so little relevant experience who was making waves inside the company in such a powerful role? There's one detail Elizabeth wasn't exactly sharing that might explain the whole thing. Were you in Sunny Ballouani ever engaged in a romantic relationship? Yes. When? Over a long period of time. Did you live together? We did.
Did you ever tell investors that you and the Ballouani had a romantic relationship at the time that you were asking them to invest in Thernis? No. Elizabeth, nearly 20 years younger than Sunny, was not just his boss. She was also his girlfriend. Even employees like Michael Craig had no idea. Now, when I heard that they had been in a relationship, I still am like, well, I really? Yeah. Were they flirtatious? No. Did you ever see them in a car together? No, she was stow it. She was stow it.
She was stow it. About just in general, Pearl. She was monk like. They kept it mostly under wraps from investors, the press, even from some board members. You think it was intentional that they hit it? Oh, it was absolutely intentional. John Kerryrue is a Wall Street Journal reporter and author of Bad Blood Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley startup. He's been covering Thernos for many years and was astounded by this twist.
Well, one of the first things that raised my eyebrows was when I had my first long conversation with the lab director and he told me that Sunny and Elizabeth were an item. And I was stunned by that. In fact, much of the publicity surrounding Thernos made it sound like Elizabeth didn't have a personal life, something her mother openly worried about in a New Yorker article.
In the same profile, Henry Kissinger, who was on the board of directors, even suggested he'd been trying to settle Elizabeth up on dates. In reality, Elizabeth and Sunny were very much together. They had met several years before Thernos when she was about 18. Sunny was 37 at the time. I met Miss Holmes in 2002 in China. We were in the same Stanford program at Beijing University. The entire department knew about her Chinese skills.
So when I first met her, I'm like, oh, you must be the Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth and Sunny stayed in touch. Elizabeth's brother Christian Holmes remembers her talking about Sunny when she returned from China. I don't know how he would qualify romantic versus personal, but as soon as she came back from China, she mentioned they had a friendship. Eventually, that friendship developed into something more.
According to public records, Sunny and Elizabeth at one point even shared a residence on Channing Avenue in Palo Alto about four miles from the Thernos office. Back at that office, they would work long hours. And together in early 2010, Elizabeth and Sunny were going after their biggest collaboration yet. Thernos was trying to land a partnership with Walgreens. They were hoping to put Thernos technology in more than 8,000 stores, basically within a few miles of almost every home in America.
This would be a huge break, and it would mean a lot of money for Thernos. We were interested in partnering with Walgreens because of the retail footprint. Here's Wall Street Journal reporter John Kerry Roo. So you can imagine that the Thernos blood test would have been available at almost every street corner. In their first pitch to Walgreens in 2010, Walgreens says that Thernos claimed they had developed small point of care devices that for the first time could run any blood test in real time.
Basically, what Thernos was promising, according to Walgreens, was a device that patients could use right at a Walgreens store to get an accurate result for any blood test from STDs to the earliest appearances of cancer. They also promised they could do this for less than half the cost of central lab tests. And all you'd need is a single finger prick of blood. Elizabeth would become a master salesman, later boasting about the massive deal with Walgreens on the conference circuit.
What we're doing in just pricing, the way that we are for Medicare and Medicaid, is saving Medicare and Medicaid hundreds of billions of dollars on an annual basis. And access for every person means rolling this out ultimately within five miles of every person's home. So our work is making it possible to do any lab test from a tiny drop of blood from a finger instead of having big needles stuck in your arm and tubes and tubes of blood taken out.
On March 22, 2010, a few months after that initial email, Elizabeth and Sonny flew to the Walgreens headquarters in Deerfield, Illinois. They sat down with Walgreens executives, including the CFO, and made a very compelling PowerPoint presentation. At this initial meeting, Walgreens says that Elizabeth and Sonny made the claim that the technology was, quote, viable and consumer ready, and that Thernos systems were validated under FDA guidelines.
They said that the fingerstick technology would be ready to launch to consumers later that year. Walgreens also says that Elizabeth and Sonny even claimed their technology had been used by the US military and foreign government operations. Years later, when Elizabeth was pressed under oath about this claim, it would come to light, it was absolutely not true. Was a Thernos manufactured device ever deployed in the battlefield? Was it ever deployed in a meta-backed helicopter?
Was a Thernos manufactured device ever deployed in a patchy helicopter? No. But in 2010, Walgreens had no idea and was intrigued. They struck an initial deal with Thernos. Before putting the technology in stores, Walgreens wanted to make sure everything was on the level. So they put together a team and brought in a lab consultant, an expert named Kevin Hunter. Kevin? Hi, Rebecca. How are you? Kevin and I recently spoke on the phone.
When I was born, my family had a small chain of drunk stores in Albany, New York. And my father ran one, my grandfather ran another. It was interesting. It goes full circle. I was working with the largest pharmacy chain in the world a couple of years later, right? And what specifically were you supposed to do for Walgreens? They specifically asked us to get involved and help them vet this opportunity with Thernos.
And to give them guidance about the legitimacy of the test and its ability to be reproduced and all those types of things. Kevin says they called it project beta. We all had shirts made up. Everybody got a nickname and I was called the expert. By the time he joined, he says he'd already heard some impressive stories about Thernos. That they had been wildly successful.
They've been, you know, the technology was being used on the battlefield with Department of Defense that they were doing in home testing for people. And that also they were working with either seven of 10 or eight of 10 of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. In August 2010, Kevin is working with Walgreens and he and some executives flew out to Silicon Valley for a meeting at the Thernos headquarters. From everything he'd heard, he was expecting to be seriously wowed.
That certainly was one that we'll remember a long time. You know, we arrived in the first thing you see is that Sonny had a Lamborghini that was parked right up front. And he was very proud of the fact that he'd been successful in other technology businesses and that was his car. The building was locked by key cards and all that kind of stuff. We were met at the ground floor immediately taken upstairs to a conference room where we only met with Sonny and Elizabeth.
And when, like for example, we would break to go the restroom, they would literally walk us to the restroom and then walk us back so we weren't allowed to look around or talk to anybody or anything like that. When you say they, who's they? Who's Sonny, Sonny would literally walk me to the restroom? Was he standing there? Yeah, it was kind of crazy. You literally would wait outside the restroom door for me and then walk me back. And so that was unusual. You know, I asked where the laboratory was.
They said it was located downstairs. I asked when we're going to get to see it and they said after lunch and then after lunch, you know, it turned to what we really don't want to show you the laboratory. I kept asking to speak with like a chief medical officer or the scientist that was working on the test development or things like that. And you know, they said they want to be keep the conversation at a high level and not bring anybody into it yet.
Kevin says he requested other things in the speeding too. For example, he asked everyone to take a Theranos blood test right then and there. And I said, let's all get our blood drawn and let's run some very basic tests here and let's go around the corner to Stanford and have them run our tests as well. And they refused to do that. And when I asked in Elizabeth, I was told to why she wouldn't let us do it. She said that she didn't trust the Stanford results.
And I found that really ironic for somebody who supposedly dropped out of Stanford and you know, fought very highly of the university to not believe their laboratory results. According to Kevin, the whole meeting felt like one big dodge after the next. But when it came to pomp and circumstance, Elizabeth and Sonny knew how to put on a good show. They presented the CFO of all green with the flag that flown over Afghanistan.
Knowing what you do now, do you think that flag really flew over Afghanistan? That's a really good question. I mean, it was certainly framed and you know, it was presented like you would see. But I have no clue. After the lab visit that would never come to be, they went out for dinner. But even that seemed a little off. We did go out to dinner at like three o'clock in the afternoon. It was kind of bizarre. We were not allowed to ride, you know, we weren't allowed to follow them.
We had to just meet them in a back room. We get to this restaurant. There's no one there yet. We still meet in the back. You know, Elizabeth got her standard kind of green protein shake that she got and was dressed in all black and Sonny got sushi or something like that. But we're not allowed to talk to each other by name yet. Sonny drives his Lamborghini.
So if you were concerned about people following you or seeing you or something like that, you know, why are you driving around Palo Alto in a black Lamborghini? It just didn't add up. Did they ever show signs of affection towards each other in front of you? No. She never shared any of our green shake with him. No, he did not. The more Kevin saw, the more questions he had. He wanted to know exactly how Theranos planned to run all these tests. I'm Dan Tabersky.
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Get an exclusive 20% off any new SimplySafe system when you sign up for fast protect monitoring. Just visit simplysafe.com slash dropout that's simplysafe.com slash dropout. There's no safe like SimplySafe. Did Walgreens believe that the Theranos technology would let you run multiple tests with the finger prick of blood? Yes, that was what was proposed to us.
Their position all along was the fact that it would be one drop of blood and one of the documents that I have shows that they said it could do 250 tests and that was August 2010 on their letterhead. And was that possible? No. No. And this is- I never saw anything that would give any credibility to the fact that the instrument didn't do anything at all. Anything at all?
Yeah. I mean, on my desk, because that one of the Edison instruments, one of their early instruments, we bugged them forever to send us an instrument so we could run tests on it and those types of things. And I begged them to let me crack it open and take a look and see what was going on inside the instrument. And it was like a computer had a little tape on the tamper evident tape on the back. And they just didn't want to do that.
And it would run for a little while and then have an error and shut down or something. I never got it to do anything that I could- that turned out a test result that could be correlated with anything. The deception was incredible. What would you say are the biggest deceptions? I think Sunny and Elizabeth's position that they could do this testing on one drop of blood was just the complete farce.
And one of the things I tried to explain to them was that- Because I challenged them and said, look, I understand the tech startup environment, you can breathe air out here in Palo Alto. You know, you have to take it till you make it to a certain extent. But you know, we're talking about testing people and people taking these lab results, making life decisions based upon the results that you give them, you need to make sure that they're right. And they just blew it off.
Kevin says he didn't think Walgreens should work with Theronos. And for a moment, it even looked like the deal was dead. But suddenly, Kevin says it was back on. Elizabeth had convinced Walgreens to stay in it. It was one of those things to where there was- there was just enough belief or just enough hope, if you will, that it was- that it was legitimate. You know, they really believed that they would put question-labour out of business.
And those are, you know, for those that aren't familiar with the laboratory industry. Those are the two eight-hundred-pound gorillas. And again, it was just- again, it was something that people wanted it to be real so badly that, you know, they were willing to kind of take people's word for some of this stuff. It was just- it was kind of bizarre. Despite what Kevin says were extensive warnings, the Walgreens team continued to move forward. Kevin says he was nervous and needed to get out.
Why did you leave ultimately? I really felt like at some point in time, either there could be some guilt by association if, you know, we're got out, but I spent a year and a half working on this project with them, you know, that I almost was- by me continuing to stay involved, I was almost endorsing it. And I didn't want that to damage my reputation. When Elizabeth started getting loads of publicity a few years after he left, even Kevin's own wife wondered if his instincts were wrong.
In early 2013, I think she made the cover of Time Magazine and my wife said to me, she said, you know, don't you think you need to admit that you're just wrong on this one? Maybe you didn't see the force of the trees. And I said, you know what, I said, I'll go to my grave knowing that, you know, that this wasn't legit and I said it may not be today, it may not be next week or next year. But the truth will come out. Eventually, it did, but that wouldn't be for a number of years.
In January 2012, Walgreens says Elizabeth and Sonny said they were on the right track with regulatory approvals and claimed their revolutionary technology was advancing and would require 99.9% less blood than the traditional blood testing services already on the market. Elizabeth and Sonny, according to Walgreens, promised Theranos would be the nation's lowest cost and highest quality laboratory provider. By late 2013, they started rolling out Theranos' wellness centers inside of Walgreens.
Two years later, they had 41 of them across California and Arizona. You might be asking yourself, how did Walgreens, a company with thousands of employees that serves millions of customers a day, not see this coming? I talked to Reed Cathrein, a lawyer who later sued Theranos on behalf of investors. Can Walgreens be held responsible here? Well, they were fooled to. They had executives that had their blood tested in rooms with the machines sitting there by their side.
And they'd have their blood tested and then they'd go off and have lunch and in the background. There were a few tests that they could run one at a time on a Theranos' machine. But they basically made it look like it was being run on this machine in the room, but they were actually doing it by hand in the lab. And so the Walgreens people got those results and thought, wow, this works. Theranos employee Tyler Schultz says many inside the company saw this behavior. There were even jokes about it.
Like during demonstrations, the joke was that they would put the cartridge into the device and there was a glove there that would take it and go run it somewhere else because they knew that the demo wasn't going to work. That was a pretty common joke. In fact, back before the Walgreens deal came together, there were experts inside of Theranos who said they knew something was up and were flabbergasted by Elizabeth's claims.
Experts like Ian Gibbons, he was named the chief scientist at Theranos in 2005. An extremely bright guy with a bunch of Cambridge degrees and nearly 200 patents to his name, tall with blue eyes and reddish hair with refined English accent and style. Ian was recommended by Channing Robertson, Elizabeth's number one cheerleader, her old Stanford professor and a Theranos board member. Ian and Channing had worked together many years before.
And I worked with Ian from the early days of biotrack, so maybe 25, 30 years. I worked with him closely at Theranos. When did you first learn about Theranos? I think it was like 2002 and Ian started consulting for Channing Robertson. That's Rochelle Gibbons, Ian's wife. She's in her early 70s with brown curly hair. She's soft-spoken but sure of herself. Rochelle says Ian's job was making the Theranos technology actually work. No easy task. If anyone could do this technology, it was a...
Rochelle, who was a scientist herself, as well as a patent attorney, says her husband was initially apprehensive to talk about work because of the secretive environment at Theranos. Elizabeth was isolating him. Probably everyone else too, but he didn't know that. He... Most scientists are really social and they can't wait to... When you get a good result, you're all over the place with it. You know, you want everyone to know. And there was none of that at Theranos.
Rochelle says Ian knew, as Theranos was closing in on its deal with Walgreens, that none of the Theranos technology worked yet. The machines, quite simply, weren't giving accurate results. She was talking about how she was improving on current technology. And we couldn't figure out what that technology she was talking about. It just became falcer and falcer. Elizabeth may have been selling a fully realized product, but Rochelle says that pitch was more fantasy than reality.
Inwardless, Ian went to work every day trying to make it work, while Elizabeth would frequently be out of office, peddling her product to investors, marketers, and board members. Rochelle says the more Ian saw, the more he thought the company was misrepresenting itself, committing fraud in his eyes, even putting people's lives at risk. Ian felt like people's lives were on balance, along with his own scientific integrity. So he was just deeply distraught.
He went to talk to Channing in confidence. He told Elizabeth about it, and she fired him on the spot. Channing told Elizabeth. And she fired Ian on the spot. Rochelle says oddly enough, Ian was almost immediately hired back, but he was demoted, and he took it hard. What she had him doing was evaluating people, people's CVs that came into the company, and he hated that. In an age of… Yeah, that's not what a scientist, a director of assay development does.
And that was true of other scientists, one of the scientists who is no longer there, was in charge of building maintenance. This was a scientist, senior level scientist. That's spending a fair amount of money to employ somebody and not use them. Why do you think Elizabeth would do that? I think they were window dressing. Because Ian was figured on the website as a principal, right? And he really had a brilliant reputation.
And she needed scientific credibility, and Ian gave her scientific credibility. According to Rochelle, there was another thing bothering Ian around this time. While all of this alleged deception was going on, Theranos was the plaintiff in a big patent lawsuit. Ian was subpoenaed by the defense to provide testimony that would potentially put Theranos in a bad light. He was incredibly anxious about it. He couldn't imagine himself up in front of a court.
He faced either purgering himself and defending the company, or openly admitting the technology didn't work. He told me that he didn't believe Elizabeth, you know, just because she's pathological liar. So he really didn't want to testify. Because he was over a barrel. They would fire him if he didn't go along with the company's story. And they knew that they didn't want him to testify. He was actually subpoenaed, so he had to testify. Even when he started at Theranos, Ian had struggled.
He'd been diagnosed with cancer in his early days, and had looked to the Theranos opportunity as a bright new chapter. But Rochelle says the lies and the treatment he saw set him further and further back. According to Rochelle, the pressure of the trial and Elizabeth's relentless intimidation tactics put him over the edge. And he started showing signs of depression. His big problem was that he didn't want to be an unemployed, even if it was at Theranos, but he hated Theranos.
So he was stormy because he really hated it. He didn't want to be there, but he didn't want to be unemployed. About Elizabeth, at that stage, he was totally negative about her. He didn't have anything good to say about her at all. He just hated her. She's a bully for one thing. She bullied him. She made him feel bad all the time. And I used to say, why does someone like you give it to someone like Elizabeth treats you like this? And he didn't really have an answer for it. I don't know.
One evening, Ian came home filled with dread, sitting in the family room of their sprawling ranch-style house with two enormous heritage oaks out front. He and Rochelle had a long conversation. She says Ian was supposed to meet with Elizabeth the next day. He expected to be fired, and he wanted to confront her. He told me how upset he was. He told me he'd never been as upset and sure enough. I thought things were going to be fine because we'd see the doctor in the next day.
It's get him treated for the depression. Then a horrific shock. Rochelle woke the next morning to find Ian had attempted suicide. Rochelle called the office to let them know he wouldn't be showing up for his meeting with Elizabeth. What made you make that phone call? Well because Ian wasn't going to show up at the meeting. I know it's a little bit stupid perhaps I shouldn't have done anything. But just to let him know that he was in the hospital wouldn't come to the meeting.
Ian was rushed to the hospital. A week later he died with Rochelle by his side. He was 67 years old. When Theranos reached out Rochelle says it was in the form of two letters. One was the email demanding all the intellectual property and any other lab books or things, the computer. And then the other one was letter from their lawyer warning me against telling anyone what happened to Ian. How many years had he worked at Theranos? Since 2003. From ten years. Ten years he worked at Theranos.
Did they send flowers? No. I expected. I fully expected something from him. And they didn't do anything. And then the other thing was a surd that was that they could think, thought they could sue me for talking about Ian. You know, they couldn't. I guess they were trying to scare me, intimidate me into thinking they were going to get me for defamation. But the defense, the defamation is truth. And so, you know, I'm telling the truth here, not lying about Theranos.
What has this done to your life? It's at the worst it's come close to ending it. But I mean, it's a... My God. People like that should be in jail. They should not be allowed to destroy people's lives. Rochelle says Ian's warnings would never be heard outside of Theranos. He would die just months before the partnership with Walgreens came together before the first Theranos Wellness Center would open in Palo Alto.
And before the company would set out on a massive ad campaign, tapping the expertise of the most famous documentarian in the world. Here we are at the ground floor of something that is revolutionary and we're part of it here from the tip of your finger. Oh, I'm going to try it. Nope. They're waiting for that moment of shock, the moment of horror. And it doesn't happen. Yeah, exactly. On the next episode of The Dropout, Elizabeth becomes a full-fledged star.
I also heard she was traveling with four bodyguards, carrying guns, packing heat, and traveled in a private jet. As her technology is launched to the public, and real patients' lives are now potentially at risk. Being able to somehow justify her mind that it was okay to put all these people potentially in harm's way. And I don't understand how someone does that. I'm just a manable personally to comprehend it.
Elizabeth Holmes, Sunny Bellwani, Tyler Schultz, Christian Holmes V and the V, Noel Holmes, Channing Robertson and Errol Morris did not respond or declined to comment for this podcast. Some material, including court depositions, were edited for clarity and time. The Dropout is written and produced by Taylor Dunn, Victoria Thompson and me. Our editors are Chris Garoube and Evan Viola, who also created our theme song. Additional editing on this episode by Nick McCity.
Our researchers are Victor Ordinness and Lane Win. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips & Y. The Dropout is a production of Nightline ABC Radio and ABC's Business Unit. Jenna Millman is the supervising producer and Stephen Baker is the executive producer. Eric Overham runs ABC Specialized Units. Thanks to the team at ABC Radio and to the Wall Street Journal's John Kerry Rue, author of Bad Blood, who's investigative reporting first exposed this remarkable story.
Be sure to subscribe to the Dropout podcast and if you like what you heard, leave us a review. Listen to new episodes every Wednesday.