From Fraudster to Folk Hero: Pseudolegal Narratives and Social Media Litigation

How does a unanimous jury verdict and settled criminal sentence come to be publicly relitigated as a conspiracy? This paper explores that question through a case study of the "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) movement's embrace of convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, examining a site where settled legal outcomes are systematically contested in online spaces and reframed as evidence of institutional corruption.

Although pseudolaw scholarship has traditionally focused on sovereign citizen movements and "freemen on the land," this paper identifies a parallel phenomenon: the emergence of "soft" pseudolaw within wellness and lifestyle influencer ecosystems. Unlike its "hard" counterpart, soft pseudolaw does not engage directly with courts through pseudo-judicial filings; rather, it appropriates forms of legal argumentation, such as due process claims, evidentiary critique, and appeals to regulatory capture, while detaching them from doctrinal substance, thereby delegitimising legal institutions in the online public square.

This paper argues that this influencer-led rehabilitation relies on modular narrative techniques: the recoding of due process as persecution, regulators as captured proxies, and fraud as suppressed innovation. These "narrative Lego blocks", including ‘victim of Big Pharma’, ‘biohacker’ and ‘embattled mother’, can be recombined to support different strands of conspiracist legal critique. Such narratives do not merely rewrite the Theranos litigation; they work prospectively to undermine confidence in courts and regulators, reshaping the legal environment in which future health technologies will be governed.

The paper considers implications for social media law and platform governance. How might content policies address "alternative investigations" that misrepresent legal findings without direct incitement or actionable falsehood? Drawing on Australian regulatory frameworks, it explores how legal doctrines governing misleading and deceptive conduct, therapeutic claims, and platform responsibilities might be adapted to address the recursive recycling of fraud narratives and their convergence with conspiracist pseudolegal discourse.