Congratulations! you’ve been hired by Billy Evans and Liz Holmes to handle their PR. What do you advise them? Options below (collected from my various sf tech group chats). What did I miss? 1) Deflect. - Issue a short, timid statement - reiterate her innocence, acknowledge mistakes - suggest the filmmakers misled the audience / the family - ask for privacy for the kids - then lay low. Most popular recommendation. 2) Disappear. - Decline press, - stop posting from Holmes’ X - avoid any public fights with Fielder. - Anything they say will be used against them - The time to reappear in public, if ever, is after Holmes is out of prison and the public has moved on. Second most common recommendation. 3) Mea Culpa. - solely Holmes, no Evans - accept substantial responsibility - a chance to earn sympathy / reframe the damaging parts of the story. (“I wasn’t fully honest with our wealthy investors, but I feel so bad I hurt the people who trusted me” kinda thing). - vibe is she has learned and matured; deep voice is gone. - Focus on humanizing, including that she was in her early 20s and clueless. - narrative is second chances + overly zealous prosecution - Hard to pull this off logistically if she can’t do an interview from prison; may need to wait until she is in a halfway house next year. Nobody thought either of them would actually go for this. 4) Full Trump. - Come out SWINGING. - Focus is on Evans, who arguably has a much bigger reputational problem than Holmes - Produce LOTS of evidence, including trial defense. show this case was less clear than everyone thinks. - publicly confront the filmmakers - truly “own” Holmes’ and Evans’ roles as the villains - press on that Fiedler has a history of tricking people, and say they were tricked. - framing as ambitious entrepreneurs with powerful enemies, eg powerful lab diagnostics oligopoly they are taking on. - Compare Holmes to other founders who were doubted but overcame. (Evans somewhat adopted this in the film when he spoke of his vengeance and powerful enemies.) For this to work, Evan needs to be so relentless that he earns support for his grit and chutzpah.