Global Courant 2023-05-17 16:17:31
Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes appears headed for jail soon after an appeals court rejected her request to remain free on Tuesday as she seeks to overturn her conviction in a blood test hoax that brought her fleeting fame and fortune .
In another ruling issued late Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila ordered Holmes to repay $452 million to the victims of her crimes. Holmes is held jointly liable for that sum with her former lover and top Theranos lieutenant, Ramesh (Sunny) Balwani, who is already in prison after being convicted of a wider range of crimes in a separate trial.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision on Holmes’ attempt to evade jail comes nearly three weeks after she initiated a last-minute legal maneuver to delay the start of her 11-year sentence. She had previously been ordered to surrender to authorities on April 27 by Davila, who sentenced her in November.
Davila will now set a new date for Holmes, 39, to leave her current home in the San Diego area and report to jail.
The sentence will separate Holmes from her current partner, William Evans, their one-year-old son, William, and three-month-old daughter, Invicta. Holmes’ pregnancy with Invicta began after a jury convicted her in January 2022 of four counts of fraud and conspiracy.
Davila recommended that Holmes serve her sentence at a women’s prison in Bryan, Texas. It has not been disclosed whether the federal Bureau of Prisons accepted Davila’s recommendation or reassigned Holmes to another facility.
Ex-partner started serving his sentence in April
Balwani, on trial after Holmes, began serving nearly 13 years in prison in April after being convicted of 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy last July. The 57-year-old was locked up in a Southern California jail last month after losing a similar attempt to stay free on bail while he appealed his conviction.
The verdict against Holmes came after 46 days of trial testimony and other evidence that shined a spotlight on a culture of greed and hubris that infected Silicon Valley as technology became a more pervasive influence on society and the economy over the past 20 years.
Ramesh (Sunny) Balwani, the former house and business partner of Holmes, will appear in court on December 7, 2022. (Jeff Chiu/The Associated Press)
The most riveting moments of the trial unfolded as Holmes took the witness stand to testify in her own defense. Holmes not only shared how she founded Theranos as a teenager after she dropped out of Stanford University in 2003, but Holmes accused Balwani of emotionally and sexually abusing her.
She also claimed that she always believed Theranos would revolutionize healthcare with a technology that she promised could scan hundreds of diseases and other potential problems with just a few drops of blood.
Rupert Murdoch owed $125 million, court rules
Pursuing that bold ambition, Holmes raised nearly $1 billion from a list of wealthy investors, including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Those sophisticated investors all lost their money after a Wall Street Journal investigation and regulatory audits revealed dangerous flaws in Theranos’ technology.
In his restitution order, Davila ordered Holmes and Balwani to pay Murdoch $125 million — by far the most of the investors listed in his order. At her trial, the court learned that Holmes had personally, unsuccessfully, lobbied Murdoch to boost the “Bad Blood” series that eventually appeared in the Journal, which he owns.
The restitution also requires the co-conspirators in the Theranos scam to pay $40 million to Walgreens, which became an investor in the startup after agreeing to run some of the flawed blood tests at its pharmacies in 2013. Another $14.5 million is owed to Safeway, which had also agreed to become a business partner of Theranos before pulling out.
In separate hearings, lawyers for Holmes and Balwani tried to convince Davila that their respective clients should pay little or nothing. Prosecutors had pushed for a restitution fine in the range of $800 million.
Both Balwani and Holmes — whose stake in Theranos was once valued at $4.5 billion — have indicated they are nearly broke after racking up millions of dollars in legal bills while proclaiming their innocence.
Holmes’ attorneys have challenged her conviction on the grounds of alleged wrongdoing and misconduct at her trial. They have also argued that errors and abuses biasing the jury were so egregious that she should be allowed to stay out of jail while the appeals process unfolds — a request that has now been denied by both Davila and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
