Reinvented Grifters Unite!

Former New York Times reporter Amy Chozick might seem to have a fatal journalistic attraction to powerful femmes fatales. In her previous career-life, she'd scored the coveted, decade-long, full-time Hillary Clinton beat at the Times, which she later parlayed into a book (Chasing Hillary), which she is now parlaying into a cable/streaming series.

She now could also be said to be chasing after convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes - were it not for the fact that it was Holmes herself who appears to have chased Chozick and lured her into her own sticky web.  The lengthy ensuing article, published on Sunday in (where else) the New York Times, has been almost universally panned as a fawning puff piece about a notorious woman who stole billions of dollars from investors, and even worse, endangered the lives of countless patients with her bogus blood-testing machine. Holmes is trying to avoid prison through endless appeals and reinventing herself as a mom, as an animal-lover who once spent 16 hours looking for her lost dog in a bramble-infested forest, and a sexual abuse survivor who does volunteer rape crisis counseling from home.

With the Holmes piece as with the book about the Hillary Clinton campaign, Chozick's shtick is to cast herself a a major, if not the main, character. 

 In the Hillary book, she couldn't get close to the candidate no matter how much she wheedled and annoyed and begged. In the Holmes saga, on the other hand, Chozick implies that she barely escaped with her life - or at least with her journalistic integrity intact.

In the first chapter of Chasing Hillary, we were introduced to a star-struck ingenue standing up and cheering for Clinton before recovering and remembering that she was supposed to be an objective reporter on assignment for her college paper. 

So if Hillary actually was demoted to a mostly offstage character in Chasing Hillary, it was her own damned fault. She barely even acknowledged poor Amy Chozick,, who gave up 10 whole years of her life to cover Clinton's two campaigns. So the repetitious bulk of the book, which I confess I never finished, revolved around Chozick's tiresome interactions with Hillary's male campaign staff, whom Chozick called "The Guys" - along with the mostly male traveling press corps. The campaign operatives spent their entire time thwarting her relentless, plucky quest of a one-on-one interview with the candidate, not to mention myriad other snide ways of leaving her out of the loop. Chasing Hillary did not sound like very much fun, In fact it sounded like sheer torture, but chock full of what fawning reviewers called "rollicking" escapades.

 Amy slogged on and persisted, even freezing her eggs until such time that Hillary would finally be crowned president and our journalistic ingenue could finally squeeze in getting her eggs fertilized and giving birth before, she implied, chasing Madam Prez straight into the White House, or at least into the White House briefing room for the spinning of official lies.

Sadly, it did not turn out that way.  But nevertheless Amy Chozick persisted even more, eventually quitting the Times for sunny California and reinventing herself as a Hollywood screenwriter and producer.

For the past several years, in fact, she's been co-producing, co-writng  and developing an HBO/Max series based upon Chasing Hillary. If it's anything like the book, it will be equal parts depressing and rollicking good fun, as four female campaign reporters canoodle and bond. (you'll be forgiven for hoping  that the Hollywood writers' strike lasts forever.)

So during an apparent lull in production, Chozick took on a side-gig that might have been called Chasing Elizabeth Holmes were it not the opposite, that it was Elizabeth Holmes who did the seductive chasing and luring. It would become Chozick's job to publicize the convicted fraudster's own attempted reinvention as a mother, an animal-lover, a volunteer rape counselor and just an all-around normal glamorous rich lady. She is just like us, right down to breastfeeding a newborn infant that she grotesquely named Invicta, and posing in ripped jeans in her luxury home and cuddling with her handsome young hunk of a partner and sweet babies on a Pacific beach at sunset.

According to Chozick's lengthy article, published in the Sunday edition of -where else - the New York Times - the old Elizabeth, who defrauded investors out of billions of dollars for a blood-testing invention that did not exist, and endangered the lives of countless patients through bogus diagnostics, a New Liz has emerged from the ashes right on the cusp of having to report to a minimum security prison for up to 11 whole years.

Chozick's piece, as expected, engendered quite the backlash, both from Times readers and media critics.

But wait. In defense of Amy, surprising even my own cynical self, her article isn't quite the puff piece that it's being criticized for. In fact, if you read between the lines, it's quite the indictment. This journalistic cream-puff is loaded with enough sly verbal arsenic to slow-kill an elephant.

Take the opening paragraphs:

Elizabeth Holmes blends in with the other moms here, in a bucket hat and sunglasses, her newborn strapped to her chest and swathed in a Baby Yoda nursing blanket. We walk past a family of caged orangutans and talk about how Ms. Holmes is preparing to go to prison for one of the most notorious cases of corporate fraud in recent history.

In case you’re wondering, Ms. Holmes speaks in a soft, slightly low, but totally unremarkable voice, no hint of the throaty contralto she used while running her defunct blood-testing start-up Theranos.

“I made so many mistakes and there was so much I didn’t know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it’s like you really internalize it in a deep way,” Ms. Holmes said as we stopped to look at a hissing anaconda.

My own published comment diverged somewhat from those of  well over a thousand outraged readers:  

The juxtaposition of the "hissing anaconda" in the zoo with Holmes' Poor Idealistic Me act sets the tone for the entire piece. Even when she is tenderly strapping her preternaturally calm infants in their car seats, the snake imagery slithers through the reader's mind. Excellent writing about a very manipulative and creepy subject. Entrepreneur that she is, I can easily envision Holmes taking her talents to her gig at the low-security prison. (That is, if she ever does go to prison.) A reality series complete with tender family visits is a definite must. "Invicta Cries For Convicta" could be the theme of one episode. To relieve the stress, the action can regularly shift to Dad with the non-Dad gym body as he copes alone and lonely in a nearby luxury rental home. Then we can watch Liz lead a counseling session with fellow sex crime victims, who will be allowed strictly supporting roles in the drama. Before we know it, she'll get a fan club, members of which will clamor mightily for her early release. Liz the showrunner is already plotting a redemption story for the ages. At least the author of this article admits that she was used. She is honest about being mesmerized by her subject. My own takeaway? Elizabeth Holmes is even more dangerous than we knew. She is not done with us yet. Unless, of course, we decide to be done with her.

Despite all the surface fluff and puff of her piece, it is through fluff and puff overkill that Chozick presents the real Elizabeth Holmes. At the very end, the reporter forsakes the Nirvana of eating berries and walking on the beach for days on end with her seductive subject and her impresario of a partner, admitting that she feared asking tough questions because Holmes was always using her breastfeeding 11-day-old baby as a helpless human shield.

Left unspoken: what kind of mother would invite a reporter from the New York Times to become a veritable part of her family as soon as the second stay-out-of-jail baby was born? We know about postpartum depression. But postpartum grifting? That's a new one.

So, no, I don't think Amy Chozick deserves all the bad press she's been getting for this particular effort. Rather than telling the world what kind of grifter Holmes is, she craftily shows us, in that disingenuous style of hers. I am normally not a fan of that kind of writing, where the reporter inserts herself in the middle of a story. But this time I think it worked.

The last time I'd felt kind of bad for Amy Chozick was when readers piled on her just before at the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, after I'd criticized her in one of my Times comments for breathlessly seeking out Donald Trump, of all people, to pontificate  on the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal. She wrote back to me in the comments to defend herself. You can read about that here if you're interested. 

Full disclosure: the main reason I felt bad at the time was that Chozick assumed my critique of the Times coverage meant that I was a Hillary fan rushing to her defense. This is the same kind of attitude the Times had toward critical lefty readers whom they dismissed as "Bernie Bros."

But enough of inserting myself into this blogpost, LOL.

Speaking of grifters reinventing themselves, meanwhile, Hillary also has a new career, as a professor at Columbia University. That Ivy League institution just lately hosted alumnus Barack Obama as the perfect guy to lecture budding journalists about press freedoms -  which, in his syllabus, is the freedom to censor both yourself and others. 

So many grifters, so little time.