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EG Erin Griffith On Hard Fork (NYT)

“Toward the end, there were a lot of spectators showing up, including people who were in a book club who read John's book and who came together as a little book club outing. And I'm asking them, what are you guys doing here? And one of them told me, which I'll never forget, oh, we're just fans of white collar crime… In the same way that there are people who are fans of murder stories or murder podcasts, there's also a fraud contingent as well.”

Hard Fork (NYT) · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“Toward the end, there were a lot of spectators showing up, including people who were in a book club who read John's book and who came together as a little book club outing. And I'm asking them, what are you guys doing here? And one of them told me, which I'll never forget, oh, we're just fans of white collar crime… In the same way that there are people who are fans of murder stories or murder podcasts, there's also a fraud contingent as well.” — Erin Griffith, Hard Fork (NYT)

Griffith, who covered Elizabeth Holmes's fraud trial, is explaining why the public still can't look away from her. She points to the odd details of the story: the outfits, the voice, the secrecy.

Transcript

Hard Fork (NYT) Around 25:28 into the episode
Speaker 4

…girl boss era, where like a lot of female founders got disproportionate press because there was so much excitement about promoting a female founder. And then, of course, they got disproportionate criticism and like, you know, they would call it takedowns because of all of that press and attention.

Speaker 3

…about her because I was a woman editor at a mostly male magazine covering a mostly male industry. And it was so novel to me to find a founder who was a woman, and not only that, but someone in biotech. So I do think gender played a huge role in my personally my covering her at that early stage. But

Speaker 4

to your question of the enduring interest, that one. Is a little bit different because there are just so many elements of her story that are a little bit like odd or attention grabbing. I mean, from the outfits to the voice to like all of the kind of like the secrecy and obsession. Yes, yeah. There are just enough pieces of it that I feel like it touches every possible demographic. Like one thing from the trial, I remember, you know, talking to a lot of the toward the end, there were a lot of spectators showing up and including people who were in a book club who read John's book and who came together as like a little book club outing. And, you know, I'm asking them, like, what are you guys doing here? And one of them told me, which I'll never forget, like, oh, we're just fans of white collar crime. And I was like, are you, you're, you mean, as a book genre or as a genre of story? Okay, sure. And in the same way that there are people who are fans of like, you know, murder stories or murder podcasts, like there's also a fraud contingent as well. John must be

Speaker 2

such a celebrity, those people.

Speaker 4

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I agree with everything you guys just said, but let me ask this, though. We're now, you know, 11 years after I broke this story in the Wall Street Journal. And who is stoking the interest? Who is recreating reasons for us to again pay attention to her? It's Elizabeth herself. She is the one who…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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