In the opening chapter of Bad Blood, the non-fiction account of defunct blood testing startup Theranos, author John Carreyrou describes the childhood of its CEO.

Elizabeth Anne Holmes knew she wanted to be a successful entrepreneur from a young age. When she was seven, she set out to design a time machine and filled up a notebook with detailed engineering drawings. When she was nine or ten, one of her relatives asked her at a family gathering the question every boy and girls is asked sooner or later. “What do you want to be when you grow up? Without skipping a beat, Elizabeth replied, “I want to be a billionaire.” “Wouldn’t you rather be president?” the relative asked. “No, the president will marry me because I’ll have a billion dollars.” These weren’t the idle words of a child. Elizabeth uttered them with the utmost seriousness and determination, according to a family member who witnessed the scene. Elizabeth’s ambition was nurtured by her parents. Christian and Noel Holmes had high expectations for their daughter rooted in a distinguished family history.

Until six years ago, Ms. Holmes was best known as the blonde-haired, black turtleneck wearing Silicon Valley CEO with the deep blue eyes and baritone voice. She was a cutting-edge “disruptor.” Her life was like an early scene in Rocky III, with the hero appearing on one magazine cover and TV show after another. Business types compared her to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, whom she idolized. As late as 2014 or 2015, Theranos was valued at $10 billion, more than companies like Uber, Spotify, and Airbnb.

Elizabeth Holmes, future cult leader?

On Wednesday, her dreamworld came to an end. A federal jury convicted Ms. Holmes, 37, on four counts of wire-fraud related charges to defraud investors. She faces a prison sentence of years or decades.

Ms. Holmes was a thief, bully, and con artist. Worse, her highly unreliable blood devices harmed patients. One woman who got a false diagnosis that she had miscarried and considered aborting her unborn child.

If unstopped, Ms. Holmes may have done worse. She told employees she was founding a religion. If they didn’t agree Theranos was creating the greatest gift for humanity ever, she advised them to quit.

Mustering sympathy for Elizabeth Holmes is only slightly easier than empathizing with other corporate crooks such as those at Enron and Tyco. Her one redeeming feature is … she didn’t torture or kill anybody. Which is the lowest bar possible.

John Carreyrou’s warts and all treatment

Yet Mr. Carreyrou treated Ms. Holmes fairly. It’s warts-and-all, a flesh-and-blood, a three-dimensional portrait.

Ms. Holmes has dreams.

She has a family with its own privileges and troubles.

She spoke fluent Mandarin and went to Stanford.

She said she wanted to help people who dreaded submitting to multiple blood tests.

She was well spoken and determined. You can see why many leaders in Washington—Presidents Biden and Obama, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former Secretary of State George Shultz—and Silicon Valley—Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and private equity king Tim Draper—fell under her spell.

In other words, Mr. Carreyrou gave the devil her due. She’s a real person, not a monster.

At first, I planned to write about the fortitude that Mr. Carreyrou, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and some people in the book, notably Tyler Shultz, displayed in withstanding the intimidation and pressure tactics Holmes and her lover Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani applied. Those impress me still.

Yet I think Mr. Carreyrou’s sense of justice deserves a shout out. He didn’t have to be fair to her; he could have made her a one- or two-dimensional figure.

In fact, Mr. Carreyrou must have been tempted to portray her as a monster. She came after him. She had her lawyers sic him, accused him of making his story up out of a whole cloth. Here he is a co-winner of a Pulitzer Prize and she’s coming after him? He must have been furious. (I reached out to him for a request for comment. He did not reply immediately.)

To be sure, Mr. Carreyrou may have been inclined to pull his punches. The professional classes who dominate the media and politics were naturally sympathetic to Ms. Holmes. Here was an upper-class young woman breaking a glass ceiling. Ripping her may have been out of the question.

Mr. Carreyrou’s treatment of “Sunny” Balwani is decidedly frostier than his of Ms. Holmes. He comes across as a completely unsympathetic figure, a bully and jerk from the start.

Justice as a many-splendored thing

 Yet Mr. Carreyrou could have thrown a shot or two at Ms. Holmes. He didn’t.

Mr. Carreyrou’s fairness is Bad Blood’s defining feature. It raises the stakes. This is more than the story of a corporate crook who stole money and hurt people. It’s also the story of a young woman who could have done good but did bad instead.

His fairness has a broader application, too. Justice, like beauty, is many splendored. We think of justice in terms of restoring it for victims or social justice. While those may be the highest forms of justice, they aren’t the only ones. Being just to others, including villains, matters too.

What did everybody else think?

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