On Tuesday afternoon, The New York Times sent out a push alert that Elizabeth Holmes had reported to federal prison to begin her 11-year-plus sentence. The notification came only a few hours after an all-hands meeting with the paper’s business desk, where journalists were still struggling to understand why the paper had, weeks earlier, run a soft-focus profile on the disgraced Theranos founder on the cover of the Sunday Business section as she was seeking reduced sentencing. 

In the feature, “Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth,” the convicted fraudster was described by writer Amy Chozick as “an authentic and sympathetic person” and a “devoted mother” who has been “volunteering for a rape crisis hotline” for the past year. “She didn’t seem like a hero or a villain. She seemed, like most people, somewhere in between,” Chozick writes. The piece came under scrutiny for, among other things, being overly credulous, which Chozick acknowledges in the piece, admitting that her own editor—business editor Ellen Pollock—had called her out for getting “rolled.” 

At the all-hands meeting Tuesday, attended by some 80 people, Pollock was asked how the story came about and what she thought of the backlash. Pollock defended the Holmes profile, and said she didn’t “give a fuck” about the criticism, according to two sources familiar with the meeting. (“My mother, may she rest in peace, would be appalled to hear that I cursed in public,” Pollock told me in an email.) 

Pollock told staffers there was nothing atypical about how the story had come about—Chozick, a former Times reporter who has for the past several years been a writer-at-large for the paper, was offered the profile by a contact, and the Times saw it as a newsworthy story, given Holmes had not given an interview since 2016. One person in the meeting pointed out that the Times had recently hired John Carreyrou, the Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter whose articles led to Holmes’s downfall, exposing her and the fraudulent practices of Theranos. Pollock noted that Carreyrou—as well as Erin Griffith, a business reporter who covered Holmes’s trial for the Times—read Chozick’s piece before it was published. Neither liked the story, Pollock said. (“John Carreyrou and Erin Griffith are wonderful!” Pollock told me. “Amy Chozick too!”) Executive editor Joe Kahn, however, did like the piece, complimenting it in a morning meeting following publication, according to a Times reporter.

Carreyrou’s hire had been a source of tension prior to the story’s publication. In March, his hiring announcement was delayed by a few days because Chozick was supposed to sit down with Holmes for the first time, and there was concern that Holmes would get spooked by learning that the Times was hiring Carreyrou, according to a source familiar with the situation. Business investigations editor David Enrich—who recruited Carreyrou to come to the Times—had a strong negative reaction to Pollock’s decision to delay the announcement, which led to some shouting in the newsroom between the two editors, the source said. As Pollock later told me, “My default decibel level when speaking to David Enrich is shouting.”

Part of the conceit of Chozick’s story was being swept up by this version of Holmes, just as Theranos board members and investors had been by another persona. But multiple Times journalists I spoke to felt that such asides and caveats were not enough to salvage the article or justify its framing. As one put it: “Why tell readers that a New York Times editor thought a reporter was too credulous, and then use the story to prove it?” Or as another put it: “You have to ask, on our side, what the hell happened here?”

Chozick recently spoke about the piece on the Longform podcast. She dismissed rumors that the story had been planted by PR—“why would the PR firm call the journalist who hasn’t had a byline in three years”—and said that the story came initially to her through “a mutual friend/acquaintance, who had heard that [Holmes] was gonna be wanting to talk” and “was looking for a journalist.” The person, Chozick said on the podcast, “was like, ‘Do you know anyone who’d be good? I know you’re busy, do you know anyone who would want to do this?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m not too busy for this one’…. It wasn’t, like, pitched to me to do it; it was like I saw a good story, and I grabbed it.” 

Holmes, I’m told, got help from Risa Heller, the crisis communications maven, in brokering the Times piece, according to multiple sources. (Heller did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

The consternation over the Holmes profile and dispute over Carreyrou’s delayed announcement highlights the specific tension of business journalism, between getting access to CEOs and founders while also doing critical investigative work. “It’s disappointing, because it undercuts Erin, and obviously Carreyrou did a lot of really great reporting on all of this stuff,” said one Times reporter. “And then we serve up a thing like that, and The New York Times becomes known as a softball place for criminal millionaires to land their puff pieces. It sucks to see.”