She acts as if she has dissociative identity disorder and that the other person was not actually her. Looks more like she was just a good actor and still has the ability to fool people into thinking she is something else, like she did to the author.
At first I wanted to alert you that homely means ugly, however then I googled the definition and found that it means ugly for AE and cozy and comfortable in BE, according to Oxford.
Still maybe good to know that it has such diverging meanings.
I recommend you sit back and review how you arrived at this conclusion. I have personally never interacted with Elizabeth Holmes and everything I know about this person has come through the lens of first media, then courts, and then media again.
It is the media, including the New York Times, that is creating this impression, is that not the case?
So, correctly your sentence would read “still has the ability to fool the handful of people who interact with her directly and then share accounts with us”.
So now, having established the actual state of affair in this ‘information graph’, the next question naturally is: “are these people really fooled or are they fooling me?” I.e. Do we have gullible people in positions that require inquisitive and thorough mindsets, or, even more “actors” pretending to being journalists, a sort of “dissociative [professional] identity disorder”.
Once I feel that I have a good view of an issue, using information weighted by reputation, I can make a statement like "This article appears inconsistent with the likely narrative, but consistent with someone who has been conned by a conman" without needing to justify my position directly, or abstracted away from the story. If you have a real alternative, you need to present it, but simply questioning someone's methodology is somewhere between irrelevant and disingenuous. At the very least, it adds little to the discussion of the issue at hand -- even more so in casual conversation where people are expressing a personal opinion of little or no real importance beyond this tiny little puddle. I mean, who is really going to respond to something like your comment with a couple of paragraphs to justify one sentence? ;)
That's a classic fallacy: appeal to/argument from authority. It's especially problematic, since who/what one presumes to be 'reputable', other people may not agree with.
Moreover the opinion of a majority of 'reputable' sources, agreeing to something, does not make it true. Reportage and stories are to be considered chiefly on the basis of what is reported and the likelihood of it being true, and should not be so staked on the reputation of the person/entity reporting it.
Declaring, without an argument that is not circular, that a collection of respected sources are all wrong (or lying) and that the truth must be something different is, by definition, a conspiracy theory.