Global Courant 2023-05-30 16:45:54
Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is about to move into her new home – a federal prison where she’s sentenced to spend the next 11 years for overseeing a blood test hoax that became a parable about greed and hubris in Silicon Valley.
The federal judge who sentenced Holmes, 39, in November recommended she be locked up in a women’s camp in Bryan, Texas, about 100 miles from Houston, where she grew up with ambitions to become a technology visionary along the lines of from Apple co. founder Steve Jobs.
Once she enters prison, Holmes leaves behind two young children — a son born in July 2021 a few weeks before her trial begins and a three-month-old daughter who was conceived after a jury convicted her of four counts of fraud and conspiracy in January 2022.
Holmes has since been released on bail and most recently lived in the San Diego area with the children’s father, William “Billy” Evans. The pair met in 2017, around the same time Holmes was under investigation for the collapse of Theranos, a startup she founded after dropping out of Stanford University when she was just 19.
Holmes, left, and her partner, Billy Evans, leave a federal court building in San Jose, California, in this photo taken March 17. (Jeff Chiu/The Associated Press)
While building Theranos, Holmes grew closer to Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who would become her romantic partner, as well as an investor and fellow executive in the Palo Alto, California company.
Silicon Valley sensation
Together, Holmes and Balwani pledged that Theranos would revolutionize healthcare with a technology that can quickly scan for diseases and other problems with a few drops of blood taken with a fingerstick.
The hype surrounding that purported breakthrough helped Theranos raise nearly $1 billion from captivated investors, build an influential board of directors that included former presidential cabinet members George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and James Mattis, and transform Holmes into a Silicon Valley sensation with a fortune worth $4.5 billion US on paper in 2014.
But it all exploded after serious dangerous flaws in Theranos technology were exposed in a series of explosive articles in The Wall Street Journal that attempted to thwart Holmes and Balwani. Holmes and Balwani, who secretly lived together while running Theranos, parted ways after the Journal’s revelations and the company collapsed.
In 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice charged both with a litany of white-collar crime in a case designed to end the Silicon Valley practice of exaggerating the capabilities of a still-developing technology — one that became known as as “fake it”. until you make it.”
Holmes admitted to making mistakes at Theranos, but steadfastly denied committing any crimes during seven often fascinating days of testimony on the witness stand at her trial. At one point, she told the jury that she had been sexually and emotionally abused by Balwani as he controlled her in a way that she said clouded her thinking. Balwani’s attorney steadfastly denied Holmes’s allegations, which was one of the main reasons they were tried separately.
Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Holmes’s former lover and business partner, arrives in federal court in San Jose, California, in December 2022. (Jeff Chiu/The Associated Press)
Balwani, 57, was convicted of 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy in a trial that began two months after Holmes’s end. He is currently serving a nearly 13-year sentence in a Southern California prison.
Holmes claimed she was treated unfairly at trial and sought to remain free while she appealed her conviction. But that offer was rejected by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, who presided over her trial, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, leaving her with no other path but the one that would take her to prison nearly 20 years after she had Theranos. set up. .
The minimum security federal prison camp encompasses about 15 acres of land and is home to about 650 women. Most federal prison camps don’t even have fences and house those who, according to the Bureau of Prisons, pose the lowest security risk.
The detention camps also often have minimal occupancy and many of the people detained there work in prisons.
Federal prison camps were originally designed with low security to make operations easier and to allow inmates charged with performing prison work, such as landscaping and maintenance, to repeatedly check in and out of a main prison.
But lax security opened a gateway for contraband, such as drugs, cell phones and guns. The limited security has also led to a number of prison camp escapes.
