I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Elizabeth Holmes—her documented crimes, her relationships with male narcissists—since seeing the bizarre performance of innocence she puts on in Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary You Can See Everything. But over the weekend, as I watched Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens withdraw her endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, to instead back his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, in the midterms, I couldn’t help spotting a parallel in their stories.
Amid the left’s backlash against Stevens, whose fallout with El-Sayed hinged, in part, on their opposing views on Israel, several people in her life have cited her attorney fiancé, Jason Turkish, as an influence on her campaign. A former spokesperson of Stevens’s, Caitlin Legacki, argued on X that Turkish—a prominent Jewish Democratic fund-raiser who announced his support for Rogers over El-Sayed before Stevens did—was “vaporizing Haley’s future so that he can be a main character in this moment and it is sad to watch her participate in that.” She went on to claim that Turkish “was an extraordinarily toxic presence, was verbally abusive to staff, and had some of the worst political instincts I’ve ever witnessed.” Other former campaign staffers have spoken out about Turkish allegedly sending Stevens negative social media posts about herself. “He would wind her up, and then we’d have to wind her down,” one aide said.
A somewhat similar narrative emerged from You Can See Everything, in which Holmes’s fiancé, Billy Evans, appears to exert control over everything from the couple’s finances to Holmes’s social media presence and even the way she beats eggs. (In comments posted to X earlier today, Evans, asked if there was “one misconception from the film” that he wanted to address, replied, in part: “That I somehow control Liz. Anyone who actually knows her would find that idea hilarious. She’s fiercely independent, strongwilled, and my best friend.”)
Yet to frame either woman as a useful idiot to her corrupting, controlling partner is not only facile, but somewhat misogynistic. Certainly, in Holmes’s case, it is possible for a criminally manipulative person to herself be manipulated. To blame Stevens’s fiancé for her “betrayal” of the Democratic Party, meanwhile, would be to call into question the agency of a woman who has served in the House of Representatives for the last seven years.
