Amy Chozick says she wrote down Elizabeth Holmes’s disputed words in her notebook as the two walked outside a rented beach home in California, adding new detail to a quote fight that has followed Holmes for years. Chozick said she later highlighted the page and marked it with a Post-it note, a paper trail she says backs the version she printed in 2023.
The dispute has returned to the center of the story because You Can See Everything revisits Holmes’s challenge to the quote and asks whether the media distorted what she said. Holmes had argued the line should have read, “They’re playing a character they created,” while Chozick says Holmes actually said, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created,” after Chozick mentioned that Jennifer Lawrence had recently pulled out of portraying Holmes in a movie.
Chozick said the exchange came during a walk while Billy Evans was at the gym. She said Holmes looked at her and delivered the line as Chozick walked a couple of steps behind, then wrote it down immediately in her notebook. “As we walked, I told Holmes that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had recently pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She looked over at me, and said: ‘They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created,’” Chozick said in describing the moment.
That account matters because the quote became part of a 2023 profile and later a documentary argument over memory, reporting and image. Holmes disputed the quote when it was published, but said the reporter went over her notes with editors, who confirmed the story’s version was accurate, and that it relayed that to Holmes before treating the matter as settled. Chozick also rejected Billy Evans’s claim in the documentary that he recorded all of their conversations.
What Chozick could not produce is the notebook itself. She said she generally keeps her reporter’s notebooks for a couple of years before discarding them, but did not keep this one and now wishes she had. She also said she was not recording audio during that part of the interview and would not have put a recorder in Holmes’s face while they walked on the beach. The unresolved question is whether any surviving contemporaneous record can settle the dispute, or whether the argument will remain a clash between a reporter’s notes and Holmes’s insistence that the line was misquoted.
