Global Courant 2023-05-30 15:59:45
Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes will report to jail on Tuesday to begin serving more than 11 years in prison for defrauding investors with false claims about her company’s blood testing technology.
Holmes, who was sentenced last fall, has failed multiple requests for her incarceration to be stayed as she awaits an appeals verdict.
Tuesday’s turning point follows a legal story that turned the former billionaire entrepreneur, who swore her startup could run hundreds of tests on a single drop of blood, into a symbol of excess and deceit in Silicon Valley.
Elizabeth Holmes speaks on Theranos’ vision at their headquarters in Palo Alto, California, July 3, 2014.
MediaNews group via Getty Images
A federal judge ordered Holmes to report to jail earlier this month after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied her request to remain free pending an appeal.
Judge Edward Davila, who oversaw Holmes’ trial, allowed her to briefly postpone the start of her sentence until May 30 while she made final arrangements, including childcare for her two young children.
Holmes will report to Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas. The minimum security facility houses other white-collar criminals, including reality TV star Jen Shah, from the cast of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”
Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Holmes’s former romantic partner and president of the now-defunct blood-testing company, began serving nearly 13 years in a San Pedro, California, prison last month. Balwani, who was Holmes’s second-in-command in Theranos, was convicted of fraud and conspiracy in December.
In denying an earlier attempt to delay Holmes’ jail sentence, Davila said she had failed to raise a “substantial matter of law or fact” that is “likely to result in a reversal or an injunction.” to a new process on all points’.”
Earlier this month, Holmes and Balwani were ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to those harmed by the company’s fraud.
In this October 17, 2022 file photo, former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes arrives in federal court in San Jose, California.
Jeff Chiu/AP, DOSSIER
Davila called on them to pay $125 million of that amount to media titan Rupert Murdoch, an investor in Theranos. Other victims in the case included the family of former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the Walton family, the founders of Walmart. Walgreens and Safeway, which also made multimillion-dollar deals with Holmes to use Theranos’ technology, were also included in a series of entities designated as victims deserving restitution.
In November, Holmes was sentenced to 135 months or 11 1/4 years in prison.
Holmes was convicted of four counts of investor fraud and conspiracy in January while at the helm of Theranos.
The verdict followed a four-month trial that detailed Holmes’ trajectory from a Stanford University dropout in 2003 to a business leader on the cover of Fortune magazine just over a decade later.
But in October 2015, a great Wall Street Journal report came out, detailing the turmoil within Theranos. When Holmes and her company came under official scrutiny, her fortunes quickly declined. Less than a year later, Forbes lowered his assessment of Holmes’s net worth from $4.5 billion to $0.
Facing accusations of massive fraud from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Holmes agreed to relinquish control of Theranos in 2018.
Miles Cohen of ABC News contributed to this report.
