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Billy Evans, the partner of the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and a central figure in the documentary film “You Can See Everything,” sat down with CBS News on Sunday, declaring he was choosing to speak out because “you can’t lose your voice.”
Over roughly nine minutes, Evans, who many people have come to see as the antagonist of the hit film directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, pushed back against the notion that he is domineering and manipulative.
Speaking with the CBS reporter Matt Gutman, Evans said he was only someone who is “deeply passionate” about his work and family. “I am not some controlling monster who’s leveraging his wife for — insert whatever anybody is saying,” he said. “No, I’m not those things.”
Here are five takeaways from Evans’s interview.
He continues to dispute the shower scene.
Early in the film, Evans is captured fully nude in the shower, in a scene that has shocked many audiences and helped earn the film an R rating. He said this month in an “Ask Me Anything” on X that it was a “false narrative” to assert that he wanted to be filmed naked, despite Lance Oppenheim’s telling GQ that the shot was Evans’s idea.
“I did not give consent to do that,” Evans told CBS on Sunday, adding that crews would film 16 hours a day and that “all sorts of things were filmed with assurances made.” Evans knew that he was being filmed in the shower, he said, but he added that he had been surprised to see the scene in the finished film. It had created an “awkward” experience for him, he said.
Evans claimed the directors had made requests to “film things that are not appropriate for television.” When Gutman urged him to explain what exactly he was referring to, Evans responded, “All sorts of things that the details I’d rather spare the audience.”
Of the shower scene, Oppenheim had told GQ: “I offered to film him in a way that could avoid seeing his genitals, but Billy said he didn’t care about being seen naked.”
A24, the production company behind the documentary, did not immediately return a request for comment on Sunday. In its broadcast, CBS said that A24 had told the news outlet that all of “You Can See Everything” had been filmed with consent.
A request for comment sent to an email address associated with Evans was not immediately returned.
He hasn’t spoken to Nathan Fielder since the movie came out.
Evans said that he and Fielder had not spoken since “You Can See Everything” premiered last month. Why not? “I think they’re probably worried I’m going to sue him,” Evans explained, before shooting down that possibility. He wouldn’t file suit, he said, “because maybe I’m a different person than most people think I am.”
He carries a gun 24/7.
Evans and the two children he shares with Holmes live in Texas, near the prison where Holmes is serving time after being convicted on four counts of fraud. He said he always carried a gun for protection.
“We have threats of violence against us daily,” Evans said. “I’ve got two kids. Threats of violence daily, and I would never forgive myself for having the tools, the skills and the ability to protect my family, and not doing it.”
Evans said an unknown man had recently screamed “the most vile things you have ever heard” at him while he drove his children to school. “This isn’t just road rage,” he said. “It was terrifying.”
He and the children visit Holmes weekly.
Evans said that seeing Holmes in prison each weekend had become “strangely normal.”
“I hate it,” he told CBS. “I absolutely hate that my daughter’s first steps were in federal prison.”
But, Evans added, he has found joy in small moments during those visits. “Our job,” he said, “is not to talk about how much it hurts and how painful it is, but to find the joy in seeing how many acorns we can collect in the prison yard and fit in a water bottle. It’s finding the small little games that we can play to make each time we go to the same place every weekend feel like you’re going to Disneyland.”
Holmes, who was initially sentenced to 11 years and three months, has been approved to transfer to a halfway house next August.
He’d do the documentary all over again.
Evans suggested that it had been a big risk to have invited “Nathan Fielder into your home for 34 days, by trusting somebody to have the right to portray you in any way, shape or form that they so choose.”
But would he do it again?
“With the same people making the same film again, with everything that I know right now?” Evans said. “One hundred percent.”
That’s because, he added, “I would also have a better understanding of what I was walking into.”
