How Accurate Is The Dropout? Show vs. Real Life Differences
How Accurate Is "The Dropout"? What's Real and What's Not
Watch out! This post contains spoilers.
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Watch out! This post contains spoilers.
The show's name alone confirms Holmes dropped out of Stanford, where she was a President's Scholar and received high praise from some of her peers and professors. Like in the show, Holmes asked her parents to invest her tuition into helping her get Theranos off the ground. All of this is shown in "The Dropout," but the first episode gives viewers a more personal reason behind her decision.
After attending a late-night college party in an effort to fit in and later lying upset in her bed, other college girls speculate outside her room that she was raped. Holmes makes the decision to drop out soon after, telling her mother about the assault.
This aspect of the show is true to life. Holmes reported her sexual assault on Stanford's campus to the county sheriff's office in 2003 according to a court document obtained by NPR. It was the same year she was a freshman and the year before she dropped out in 2004. It came to light for the first time in Holmes's 2021 court testimony, where she said, "I was questioning what—how I was going to be able to process that experience and what I wanted to do with my life. And I decided that I was going to build a life by building this company."