Maybe Elizabeth Holmes, whom a grand jury indicted last month for fraud, never should have asked herself, “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” 1

The eye-roller slogan adorned a plaque on Holmes’ desk at Theranos, her ignoble blood-testing startup. She seems to have gravely misread it. Rather than goading her to courage, the words blinded her to the obvious. In launching a company with a sub-Edsel product as a keystone, she could fail. And of course did.

In May, the journalist John Carreyrou, who made Theranos his white whale for years, published Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, a potboiler about the company; I devoured it. But it didn’t slake my thirst for enlightenment about that epochal evildoer: Holmes herself. Holmes herself.

Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is an Ideas contributor at WIRED and the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. She is also a cohost of Trumpcast, an op-ed columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and a frequent contributor to Politico.

Holmes is no one’s maidservant or adjunct. She’s not Imelda Marcos or Ivanka Trump or Kellyanne Conway. Holmes is the master puppeteer of Theranos. It’s clear in Bad Blood that it was she—and no one else—who managed to drive the company’s value up to $9 billion without a working product; and she alone who was able to win unholy investments of trust, as well as a whopping $900 million from superstar investors, including education secretary Betsy DeVos and her family ($100 million) and good old Rupert Murdoch ($125 million). Holmes, in the book and now the indictments, comes off like a cheat, a pyramid schemer, an evil scientist, for heaven’s sake.

She’s also a woman. And we’re not used to self-made young female oligarchs lying outrageously, fleecing the hell out of other billionaires and conducting thunderous symphonies of global deception. There’s no American template for a powerful woman gone so gravely wrong. Holmes wasn’t insane. She wasn’t dissembling all those years to care for a sick child, or pursue another altruistic, if desperate, end. It wasn’t men, either. Though some have tried, she can’t—as the facts are laid out in Carreyrou’s book—be explained away as a victim of her deputy, sometime boyfriend and codefendant Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. She wasn’t caving in to patriarchy.

There’s no American template for a powerful woman gone so gravely wrong.

So—how to understand Elizabeth Holmes? Is there a feminist framework for reading her that takes into account her gender and singular experience as a beginning chemical engineer and self-made female billionaire that doesn’t absolve her of traditional moral responsibility—or, worse, agency?

Kira Bindrim at Quartz has nominated Holmes as “our first true feminist antihero” and has even risked admiring Holmes for her deep dark arts. “There is something spectacular about watching her ignore, override, or shout down dozens of male voices,” Bindrim writes. “Her chutzpah does command a certain dumbfounded respect.”

Bindrim has a point. But Holmes’ chutzpah—if we’re to respect it—must be identified. Bad Blood yields almost no sense of how Holmes saw and sees the world. What made her think she could bluff and bluff and bluff on what must be the lowest hand ever played in Silicon Valley—no cards at all?

Whatever the gender of bona fide blackhats, it takes years to unravel their evil deeds as either banal or outstanding. No doubt Holmes’ particular malevolence will elude observers for some time to come. To my mind, Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi virtuoso who was arrested in 2008, only came into focus in 2011, when Steve Fishman conducted a masterpiece jailhouse interview with him. In it, Madoff makes a clean breast of his crimes, but he also describes feeling, as he ran his fraud, ill-used by his clients. He sees himself as the victim of their tyrannical greed. They treated him like a slave, he complains. The clients, Fishman writes, “became giants of philanthropy, happy to take public bows, while, in his view, it was Bernie from Brooklyn who thanklessly drove the engine.”

Is this how Holmes felt, too, old Holmes from Houston, indentured to her would-be partners—Walmart, Walgreens, the US military—and her intimidating investors? Maybe she became a woman in the Scheherazade mode, dazzling her captor with her intelligence lest she stop and be killed. That female archetype is where Madoff evidently sees himself. But Holmes, if you listen to her, does not seem to see herself as servile so much as preternaturally suspicious—particularly of anyone who would doubt her.

This is hard to tell from the reporting alone. In Bad Blood, Holmes is almost always filtered through a man’s apprehension of her. As man after man reports it in the book, her signature misdeed was seduction and betrayal. She’s described as “hypnotic,” and men repeatedly regard her as an enchantress, a blond cipher who spun a mesmeric tale about a world-historical blood-sucking widget. But in these stories the flip side of Holmes is—brace yourself—a bitch who crushed the men who questioned her.