Holmes Film Plays to an Audience of One — Herself, Says Sam Mangel

Sam Mangel, the federal prison consultant CNN has called the consultant for Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, says the documentary offers Elizabeth Holmes “no benefit whatsoever.”

Elizabeth Holmes has been serving a federal sentence since May 2023, and this October a documentary about her arrives in theaters. The film is called You Can See Everything, and A24 releases it on Oct. 16. Filmmaker Nathan Fielder began shooting 34 days before the Theranos founder surrendered.

The trailer spread widely at the end of August.

In it, Holmes tells Fielder, "I'm not that person. I can promise you that." He asks whether she is being real right now. "I'm always being real," she answers, rocking a baby with her foot as the camera pulls back.

Most of the reaction has focused on whether she meant it, but there is a more practical question almost nobody is asking.

What does a movie like this do to a woman who is still incarcerated?

Mangel is a federal prison consultant who prepares white-collar defendants for what federal custody is actually like, including, as CNN reported as the consultant for Steve Bannon and former Trump adviser Peter Navarro. The Sunday Times profiled him in 2024 as the “prison fixer” who can get white-collar defendants a quieter cell or a better job.

He also served time himself. Mangel ran a life settlement brokerage outside Philadelphia, was charged in federal court in 2016, pleaded guilty, and served 21 months of a 60-month sentence at the federal prison camp in Miami before coming home in 2020. He currently has clients at FPC Bryan, the Texas camp where Holmes is serving her sentence.

He said it works for exactly one person.

"That movie is literally serving an audience of one, and that is her," Mangel told Law&Crime's Sidebar.

He does not believe it can help her legally. "Only a judge can do a sentence reduction," he said, noting that Holmes already qualifies for the prison programming reflected in her release date.

She was sentenced to 135 months, and the Bureau of Prisons lists her projected release as Feb. 22, 2030.

Because the people who shape the rest of her sentence are watching it too. Staff at the camp assign work details, approve visits, and write incident reports, and Mangel said there is already "a lot of animosity amongst the staff as to who you are" when a high-profile inmate arrives.

Holmes is still challenging her conviction, and Mangel called the documentary "a slap in the face to an appellate court." He does not believe it helps her if she ever applies for clemency either.

"Acceptance of responsibility is a key measure in someone moving forward throughout the system and after," he said. A film shot 34 days before surrendering is, in his words, "the complete opposite of what an inmate or a defendant should be doing."

The other women at Bryan will see it as well, and Mangel said the inmate population loves that sort of thing, because suddenly there is a star on television.

Blend in. He advises high-profile clients to arrive like a wallflower and to be "a little fish in a big sea."

"For the first week, yes, she's Elizabeth Holmes, former billionaire, high-profile person," he said. "After that, she is just a number."

Not everyone manages it, and Mangel said one client, a politician, was three months into a short sentence and still asking whether the staff knew who he was.

Lights come on at 6 a.m. except on weekends, and inmates eat breakfast before reporting to a job assignment, whether that is kitchen work, orderly duty, or something else. Lunch is at 11 a.m., everyone stands beside their bed for a count at 4 p.m., and there is another count at 9 p.m.

Mangel calls Bryan the nicest of the women's camps, and he uses the word carefully, because it runs programs other facilities do not, including one where inmates train service dogs and keep them.

He said the real danger at a camp is not violence but boredom. "People tend to get in trouble," he said. "Remember, you're in a camp. There are no fences or gates around it." Contraband follows, including phones, tablets, liquor, and drugs.

Mangel is not defending her, and the record is not in dispute. A jury convicted Holmes of defrauding investors in January 2022, and the Justice Department said Theranos returned inaccurate results to patients screened for cancer, to women monitoring pregnancies, and to one person told they carried the precursor virus to AIDS.

His point is narrower, and it comes from having walked a lot of people through that door and gone through it himself. Holmes made the film for the one audience that cannot help her, and it will not buy her a single day.

You Can See Everything opens Oct. 16.