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A whistleblower is a person who reveals information about wrongdoing in an organization. Usually, they are an employee or former employee who speaks out at considerable personal and professional risk. They play a critical role in keeping institutions honest and accountable.
Although whistleblowers are rare, they are powerful sources for uncovering corruption in businesses and government. Their impact can be significant and felt widely, from Deep Throat providing clues about the Watergate scandal to former employees of the tech startup Theranos revealing that the company was putting its customers’ health at risk.
The reporter who broke the Theranos story, John Carreyrou, recently spoke at the Craig Newmark CUNY School of Journalism, along with whistleblower Erika Cheung. They broke down the relationship between reporter and whistleblower, and how they agreed to protect her anonymity.
Carreyrou, then an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal, had been working on a story about the buzzy medical technology company for months.
He had read other articles about Theranos that included intriguing details. He also got a tip from someone in the blood testing industry that he wanted to follow up on. The company claimed it could perform multiple medical tests using only a single drop of blood, but there were questions about how its technology worked and whether the results were accurate.
Carreyrou sent emails and LinkedIn messages to employees and former employees, but most didn’t want to talk. Many of them had signed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with Theranos. He did get one insider to speak to him under the condition of anonymity, but a single anonymous source wasn’t enough for a story. He needed someone else to corroborate the account. “There was no way the Wall Street Journal was going to publish this investigation with one anonymous source,” Carreyrou said.
But that source gave him some names of other people who might be willing to talk, and one of them was Cheung, who had recently left Theranos for another job.
He called her in May 2015 and made his pitch: He knew she signed an NDA and people associated with Theranos were afraid to talk, but he also knew things were going on at Theranos that were endangering its customers.
Cheung recounted that first phone call: Carreyrou had called her new workplace, and she was brought into her CFO’s office to take the call. She was about 23 years old and recalled feeling scared, but also relieved that she might be able to tell her story.
“When I got that call, it was like a breath of fresh air,” Cheung said. They agreed to meet at a small bar in Berkeley, California. Once there, the journalist laid out the ground rules.
Carreyrou says he typically explains to sources the different ways they can speak to him: On the record means he can publish anything they say with attribution to their name; off the record means he can’t quote them at all; and on background means he can use the information and quote them but can’t publish their name.
Cheung explained that she agreed to speak to him on background to maintain her anonymity. “That was very, very important to me,” she said. “I do remember that being very clearly explained to me.”
She had done her research on Carreyrou, too. She spoke to other former colleagues about him and looked him up online, seeing that he had won two Pulitzer Prizes. “This seems like the right person to discuss this with,” she remembered thinking.
Over the following months, the journalist and source went to great lengths to keep her identity a secret. They avoided sending emails, which could be subpoenaed, and Cheung described using burner phones to call Carreyrou. But attorneys for Theranos had deduced she was likely a source. They had her followed, parked outside of a house where she was staying temporarily and sent her threatening letters.
Carreyrou gave her the name of an attorney, who provided legal advice. Since then, The Signals Network, a non-profit group, has been established to provide legal, financial and media relations support to whistleblowers. The Signals Network helps whistleblowers without compromising the relationship between the journalist and the source. Although Carreyrou had agreed to keep Cheung’s identity secret, her cover was later blown when she gave a deposition in the Theranos case that was filed in the public record. She has since spoken publicly about her experience.
Their story ends on an unusually successful note: Carreyrou published a series of stories on the Theranos scandal in the Wall Street Journal and won awards for his reporting.
Founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. Carreyrou went on to write a book called “Bad Blood” that reads like a thriller, and Cheung became executive director of the nonprofit Ethics in Entrepreneurship.
Want to learn more? The fall of Theranos is depicted in both a documentary, “The Inventor,” and a Netflix miniseries, “The Dropout” starring Amanda Seyfried.
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