Just yesterday we heard that the jury in Elizabeth Holmes’ case was deadlocked on three out of the 11 federal charges against her. It seemed like the former Theranos founder, who defrauded investors out of nearly a billion dollars and put patients at risk, was going to skate. The good news is that the jury went back into deliberations and returned with guilty verdicts on four charges, the ones related to defrauding investors. She was not found guilty on the charges of defrauding patients and the jury returned no verdict on three charges. The judge will have to issue a ruling on those. Holmes could get up to 20 years in prison and steep fines. (She is facing 20 years on each charge, but the NY Times reports that the sentences will likely be concurrent.)
Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO and founder of failed blood testing startup Theranos, was found guilty on four charges of defrauding investors, capping off the stunning downfall of a former tech icon.
She was found not guilty on three additional charges concerning defrauding patients and one charge of conspiracy to defraud patients. The jury returned no verdict on three of the charges concerning defrauding investors, and Judge Edward Davila, who is presiding over the case, is expected to declare a mistrial on those charges.
The charges Holmes was found guilty of include one count of conspiracy to defraud investors, as well as three wire fraud counts tied to specific investors. Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison as well as a fine of $250,000 plus restitution for each count.
Holmes departed the courthouse hand-in-hand with her partner, Billy Evans, her mother and her father. She was met with a sea of cameras and reporters but did not comment in response to questions shouted from reporters.
In a statement, U.S. Attorney Stephanie Hinds applauded the verdict.
“The jurors in this 15-week trial navigated a complex case amid a pandemic and scheduling obstacles,” she said, in a statement that was read aloud by a spokesperson outside the courthouse. “The guilty verdicts in this case reflect Ms. Holmes’ culpability in this large-scale investor fraud, and she must now face sentencing for her crimes.”
Holmes, 37, had a son last July with a 29-year-old hotel heir named Billy Evans whom she reportedly married in 2019, which has not been confirmed. I was hoping that Holmes would be convicted on more counts, but this is more than I expected, especially after she cried on the stand and tried to blame her ex partner, Sunny Balwani, for her crimes. Hopefully she’ll get the maximum sentence. This should serve as a warning for other charismatic would-be entrepreneurs who want to claim that they’ve revolutionized science and technology with little to no experience in either.
Her eyes always have that same dead look that Zuck has, just with makeup.
They both have no soul.
Now that you mention it you can see she’s had an eye job in the last few years too. Maybe to look more human or attractive?
It is very creepy to me how much she looks like Zuckerberg. He’s such a unique looking guy, and she has the exact same face.
It’s still a slap in the face to patients who thought they were getting accurate medical info and might have had a serious medical condition missed because it her fraud.
Agreed. I don’t understand how a jury could find her guilty of defrauding investors but not patients.
The only explanation I can think of is the people among the jury made some sort of compromise, which happened to me once on a jury. One stubborn juror wanted to acquit the defendant on one charge and tried to bargain with us. Thankfully we eventually convinced her that the inconsistency would be weird and we were able to agree on convicting on all charges. But in the Holmes case, it seems there were some major disagreements. At least they agreed on something, I guess.
I’d love for the jurors who voted yes on defrauding investors but no on the patients to explain their decision. It makes no sense at all and I hope she’s hit with another trial on those charges as well as personal class action suits from patients
I wonder if it was framed like, SHE directly lied to investors. “Theranos” was the entity that lied to patients.
I don’t agree with that, but I could see her escaping responsibility because there wasn’t a direct line of communication from her to patients.
I may be wrong but I thought I read that during the trial, that only a very small number of patients were called to testify and they were extremely limited in what they could tell about their stories.
I was shocked to find that they were not allowed to testify about any of the emotional toil, pain or grief that the incorrect diagnosis caused them.
So now I wonder if this has been reflected in the verdict because the jury basically never got to hear about the horror stories many patients went through?
No justice for the little guy, is the way I see it. Millionaires lost some money, but average people lost so much more.
She deserves jail just for that creepy voice alone. But in all seriousness I hope she goes to jail for the rest of her life. This narcissist could have killed thousands of people.
How someone who was such a micromanager and S. Jobs copycat, but had no idea what her ‘scientists’ were doing is laughable to me.
She’s up there with the founder of OneCoin Ruta Ignatova.
I’d heard about her cultivating the voice, but when I finally watched “The Inventor,” I guess I didn’t hear what others did. I thought she sounded like she was trying to sound like Frank Oz-very muppet-like. Plus, to me it seemed like she was swallowing/gasping as she spoke, and it was distracting.
Read the book by John Carreyrou-Holmes should definitely be in prison for endangering patient lives. She’s been manipulative from the start.
The Carreyrou book is excellent. Highly recommend if anyone is looking for new reading.
It sounds to me like she’s holding in the burp of a lifetime lol.
Unfortunately, I doubt she will do much jail time. And the time she does will be at a club fed prison.
I hope you’re wrong @MAC. I feel like we have made some significant strides in the last year, but if they just up and let this blonde hair blue eyed woman off with a slap on the wrist, then I just give up.
Yes, but she will always be introduced as “Convicted Felon Elizabeth Holmes”! It has a nice ring to it.
How could she not be found guilty of defrauding patients? To me that is the most egregious part of her scam. That is insane.
She should have been found guilty on ALL charges but I guess it depends on what could be proved.
Didn’t she try the old ‘I was manipulated by the older foreign man’ white woman tears BS?? Don’t get me wrong, he was just as culpable as she was but she was trying to blame it all on him using their affair to gaslight him.
She has psycho written all over her – I fear for her son and husband as they will be the ones who will bear the brunt of her evil narcissism. Apparently his family did not want him marrying her and cut him off from the family business to protect their assets from her grasping hands.
She absolutely tried the white woman tears defense, not surprisingly. She never would have gotten away with this fraud if she hadn’t been a young blond white woman with connections in the first place. It’s no wonder she tried to use the same to get herself out of it.
she did claim that she was the victim of abuse by the brown foreigner and that he was to blame.
I honestly thought she would be found not guilty on all counts, so I was glad to hear this verdict. I hope she does the full 20 years (assuming the sentences are concurrent).
I did too. Especially after the crying, the baby and fiancée, parents, and her style of clothes, it all seemed so performative and dissociated from her CEO persona.
I really feared the baby would get her off the hook. I mean that’s the reason she got pregnant in the first place. Good to see that the plan didn’t work, but I do feel sorry for the baby. I hope the dad is a better person.
Right it’s like she was this Steve Jobs impersonator for so many years only to swing wildly the other way once Theranos dissolved and found a more age appropriate rich hotel heir with money to take care of her and had a kid with him to play up the doting mother and wife image. The one thing that remained the same is her messy hair, she can’t for the life of her figure out how to style it.
She was so obvious about it all. I loathe her and her fake tears.
I’m mystified why the investors were given greater weight than the patients that received erroneous information?! Holmes is a grifter that put patient lives at risk PERIOD. If the prosecution didn’t emphasize that, they missed the point.
Plus she and Sunny terrorized any employees who questioned what was going on. They tracked anyone who left and might be potential whistleblowers relentlessly, sued and slandered them, drove one man to take his life.
Horrible, horrible people.
The patient drains was going to be harder to prove because EH was not personally interacting with them the way she was with investors. Also, a huge database of test results was basically “lost” which meant that the prosecution had to make their case without some big potential evidence. The tests were absolutely riddled with errors (according to some former employees I know) but without that database it’s much harder to prove.
Well, she should have been found guilty of a hell of a lot more, but I’m pleasantly surprised that a rich, blonde, white woman is facing some consequences in America.
She’s only facing consequences because she bilked wealthy white Republicans.
Yep. Exactly. What a farce.
Her dad was an Enron executive too.. read it somewhere.
She deserves to go away for a long time, but I bet she gets maybe 5 years. Just a hunch.
The fact that she wasn’t convicted on the patient fraud is horrifying, but probably has to do with what the prosecutors were allowed to present to the jury. They had to try to get a jury that didn’t know much going in (so, people who didn’t read Carryrou’s book, among other things), and the they even say in the subscriber edition of his podcast that prosecutors were not allowed to elaborate on the patient impact. In one instance they messed up procedurally and ended up not being allowed to present some of the evidence on patients’ experiences. I’m guessing the jury just didn’t find the little they heard on this count to be enough, unfortunately.
Yes, while the patient fraud is arguably worse from a moral/ethical perspective, it was going to be much harder to prove. I would love for her to be guilty on everything, but if she gets decent jail time for the 4 guilty counts I’ll be quite happy.
She might have been found guilty of some charges but I highly doubt she will get anywhere close to the maximum sentence – maybe 2-5 years max. No doubt many tears and pleas of “I’m a white mother!” will come into play during sentencing. Ugh. Those poor victims, and her poor kid.
The fact that she wasn’t convicted of defrauding the PATIENTS hurts my soul. Guess we have to be grateful that she defrauded enough wealthy investors that she was actually convicted of something.
@Jasper
Exactly
You can defraud the lower and middle classes all you want but the gods help you if you defraud the wealthy.
Sentencing in federal court is handled by the judge, who uses the US sentencing guidelines. The guidelines determine the minimum amount of time a person can serve for a certain crime— from there the judge has discretion to increase/decrease the time. General consensus seems to be that based on the guidelines, she’d serve at minimum 9 years in prison. Also time served for federal crimes has no parole.
Criminal lawyers please correct any mistakes I’ve made.
She is a vile human being. I sincerely hope she receives the maximum sentence. I bet she thinks she’s a victim in all of this.
When her magical invention came out…I was like…HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? To use so little blood to get test results & the fact that ALL of the testing materials were exclusively made by her company & how she got that pipeline of MILLIONS from some of our BIGGEST pharmacies like Walgreens…so quickly while pushing an invention that wasn’t even PEER REVIEWED…says a LOT about the power structure in this country
It really is astonishing.
I couldn’t believe it was allowed to go so far with only smoke and mirrors.
She gave black turtlenecks a bad name. They’re my all time favorite wardrobe piece.
Seriously, she looks absolutely psychotic and the videos I’ve seen her in have been frightening.
Those eyes, those eyes, those very scary eyes.
In the podcast The Dropout they talk about how she told multiple people “I’m too pretty to go to jail”, and how a lot of the board members and early believers thought she was beautiful. It mystifies me, but I think she had a lot of confident swagger coming from a rich, powerful family that had hospitals named after them.
I think the blatant Pfizer fraud, using their logo on materials without permission and falsifying memos from them is what got her in the end. Absolutely horrifying that she was not found guilty for patient fraud. That poor baby being used as a pawn in these schemes.
At least they found her guilty, but it was the patients who were most screwed over. What was infuriating during tge trial was that the jury weren’t allowed to learn so many facts that show her true personality – that she drove her chief chemist to suicide and gave cold shoulder to his widow afterwards… How she terrorized Tyler Schultz and Erika Chung with lawyers and following them, making him suicidal as well.
Yes!
I hope all the jury now go off and Google their hearts out about her and listen to the Podcasts and maybe then they’ll understand how wrong they got it on the patient fraud and how she has ruined the lives of some of the people that worked for her. My heart breaks for the widow of Ian Gibbons.
I realise that it’s not all their fault because of how trials work and what can and cannot be conveyed or testified……but still.
I actually feared she’d get off on all charges so I’m going to take pleasure that she will do some prison time at least and will always and forever be known as a convicted felon.
I think she was hoping to walk in the courtroom with a big pregnant belly. Such a manipulator. I’m guessing much of the investor fraud communication was through emails, memos, voice-mail, to specific people from her specifically. The patient fraud communication was probably more generic, so it would have be easier for her to say, someone put my name on that, it was an email address several employees used. And patients would talk to more than one employee and not always remember who. So convicting an individual of investor fraud vs patient fraud seems easier in this case.
What she did was dangerous and reckless. This case isn’t about money. It’s amazing people didn’t die. She needs significant jail time.
I just learned her dad was an Enron executive! Family of grifters. Also read an article yesterday on how she messed up funding for years and years for actual researchers. They’re just starting to right that ship under Covid. What a POS.
Holy cow really?! I was living in Houston during the Enron fiasco. We knew people involved, not in the dirty stuff but who just worked there and were collateral damage. It was a crazy time. This woman has no soul.
“This should serve as a warning for other charismatic would-be entrepreneurs…” does anyone think she’s charismatic? I thought she was well-connected more than anything. She has never had an ounce of charisma. Maybe to some she wasn’t an obvious charlatan but she always came off as awkward and kind of unsettling.
Notice the convenient 666 pose with her fingers! Hail Satan! I hope she and her fake voice and dead eyes rot in jail. She’s going to ask if she can wear her black turtleneck in prison. Delusional evil witch.
It’s time to acknowledge that our jury system is broken. There is no way she should have gotten convicted with just 4 of the 11 counts. Jurors are using Law and Order standards to guide their decisions or in the case of Rittenhouse nothing is being put in place to prevent judges from acting as the defense. It’s like they wanted to punish her, but not too much because she “cried” tears and was abused.
I’ve been glue to both Bad Blood and the Dropout podcasts which covered her rise and fall. And the recordings of her just lying her ass of are just disgusting. Shame on those jurors for not finding her guilty on ALL counts. JAIL JAIL JAIL and the sooner the better.
There is something really wrong with the system when you get 20 years for defrauding investors, but the average sentencing for rape is 10 years.
The only reason she got so far is because rich idiot dudes gave her grace. They didn’t want to seek out/support actual female innovators, they just wanted a blonde to make them feel good. That’s why rich guys bought into her, and it’s them that are embarrassed now, and that’s why investors are the only ones getting justice. Her investors will stay in the shadows, making millions elsewhere.
Her meteoric rise is symptomatic of a larger issue, that it’s hard for women to get anywhere in tech without putting on a ridiculous act. I know women who look like her in the bio/tech space and all they do is suck up to rich men, while taking credit for the work of their exhausted underlings.
There is a reason why she didn’t solicit investors from the scientific community. She was a con artist from the beginning. She knew to go to investors that would not question her methodology. That alone proves she was a fraud and not incompetent. I hope the judge throws the book at her.
That’s one of the key things from the book that stood out for me. She got all these high profile people, but none of them knew anything about medicine or healthcare. Hmmm, wonder why?!
I also read an essay recently about the patients – how there might be a case to prosecute in Arizona for what happened to them, though it would be a more difficult case to make than the fraud one was. I wish they’d do that though – sure, she cost people money, but how many sleepless nights did patients have? How many made potentially life-changing decisions based on her crappy testing? Those are not little things.
Interesting how George Schultz’s grandson helped bring her down. He was hired because of his grandfather and then he and another employee, Erika Cheung, became whistleblowers exposing the fraudulent methods that were being used.
Since the patients were denied, can they now file a civil suit?
Medical malfeasance is serious business. Peoples lives are at stake with erroneous diagnosis’. Bye bitch.
fuck patients, amirite? plus: it’s good to know the investor class got justice.