![]() Legal experts say beyond the alleged abuse defense, it appears Holmes will argue she did not fully understand the complex science behind the devices and believed they worked. Evans was in attendance at the trial, sitting several rows behind Holmes with the public. She had her first child with her partner, the hotel heir Billy Evans, on 5 August. Holmes’s trial comes after months of delays caused first by the global pandemic and then Holmes’s own pregnancy. “The investors in this case are incredibly sophisticated people who knew the risks of investing,” he said.Īfter both sides concluded their opening statements, the prosecution called its first witness: Denise Yam, a corporate controller at the company from 2006 to 2017, who detailed some financial figures from that time before proceedings came to a close for the day. He also argued that the investors who were allegedly defrauded by Holmes were aware of the dangers of Silicon Valley investing and recognized that Theranos was a speculative investment. “By the time the trial is over, you will see the villain the government just represented is actually just a living, breathing human being who did her very best each and every day – and she is innocent,” he added. “But failure is not a crime – trying your hardest and coming up short is not a crime.” “In the end, Theranos failed, and Ms Holmes walked away with nothing,” he said. “She poured her heart and soul into that effort,” he added. He said she “worked herself to the bone” for 15 years trying to make lab testing cheaper and more accessible. Wade painted a picture of Holmes as a hardworking young woman who did not understand that the technology at Theranos could not live up to her lofty ideals. Balwani, who faces his own trial in 2022 for fraud, has strongly denied these claims.Ī courtroom sketch of Elizabeth Holmes as opening arguments begin. “Her deceit of reporters was an important way that she executed her fraud,” Leach said.Īs the trial gets under way, early court filings suggested lawyers for Holmes would try to prove she was manipulated by an “abusive” relationship with Balwani into over-promising the capabilities of Theranos devices. ![]() Lionizing media coverage of the company and its CEO were crucial in polishing Theranos’s image, prosecutors alleged. “Out of time and out of money, Elizabeth Holmes decided to lie,” the US attorney Robert Leach said. Photograph: Nick Otto/AFP/Getty Imagesįederal prosecutors argued that Holmes and her alleged co-conspirator, her former romantic partner and business associate Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, defrauded investors and deceived patients when the company began making its tests commercially available. Holmes’s incarceration will mark an extraordinary fall from grace for the one-time Silicon Valley magnate.Ī college dropout, Holmes was hailed as a visionary for her promise to revolutionize blood-testing with technology that could carry out hundreds of tests on a single drop of blood.People line up for the fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes outside the courthouse in San Jose on 8 September. But Davila wrote that even if the appeals court agrees with Holmes that the lower court had made errors, the issues were not “substantial” enough to merit a reversal or new trial. While Davila called the travel plans a “bold move” and Holmes’s failure to cancel the ticket post-conviction a “perilously careless oversight”, he accepted her assertion that she was not trying to flee the country.Īttorneys defending Holmes have raised a number of evidentiary and procedural issues with the trial in their appeal to the federal ninth circuit court of appeals. Prosecutors had attempted to argue that Holmes did pose a flight risk, revealing that her partner had bought her a one-way flight to Mexico shortly before the verdict was returned.
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