Elizabeth Holmes to start prison term May 30
Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is set to report to prison at the end of the Memorial Day weekend.
Holmes must report to the Bureau of Prisons by 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 30, according to a ruling earlier this month from federal judge Edward Davila of the Northern District of California. Holmes' lawyers proposed the new reporting date, asking for two weeks for Holmes to make "medical and child-care arrangements," court filings show.
From the meteoric rise of Theranos to a $9 billion valuation, to its abrupt fall when its technology was revealed to be flawed, Holmes became a symbol of the shameless hyperbole that often saturates startup culture. Her true intentions remain unclear — to the point that Davila, who presided over her trial, seemed mystified.
"This is a fraud case where an exciting venture went forward with great expectations and hope, only to be dashed by untruth, misrepresentations, hubris and plain lies," Davila said at her sentencing. "I suppose we step back and we look at this, and we think what is the pathology of fraud?"
Holmes, a Stanford dropout, boasted that Theranos' technology would quickly scan for hundreds of diseases and other health problems with a few drops of blood taken with a finger prick. But the technology never worked as promised, and Theranos tests produced wildly unreliable results that could have endangered patients' lives — one of the most frequently cited reasons why she deserved to be prosecuted. However, the jury that convicted Holmed last year of duping investors out of nearly $1 billion acquitted her of deceiving patients.
Appealing her sentence
Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for the fraud, and ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to the duped investors, who include Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Ironically, it was the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal that first revealed that Theranos' blood testing was fraudulent. Holmes' trial included evidence of her efforts to squash the story.
Holmes is appealing her conviction, but her bid to stay out of prison while the appeal proceeds failed earlier this month, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Holmes' appeal was unlikely to result in her sentence being overturned.
Where will Holmes serve her sentence?
Holmes is expected to serve her 11-year sentence at a low-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas, according to the Associated Press. Authorities have not publicly named the prison to which she has been assigned, although Davila previously recommended that Holmes serve at Bryan, noting that the prison allows for family visitation, and that seeing family members makes inmates less likely to re-offend.
Holmes, 39, has a 1-year old son and a 3-month old daughter with her partner, Billy Evans. In court papers, her lawyers have noted that she is preparing for travel outside her home state of California.
At Theranos' peak, the startup that promised to revolutionize blood testing was valued at $9 billion, making Holmes the richest self-made woman in the world, if only on paper. But after a series of articles by the Wall Street Journal revealed the technology didn't work as promised, the company unraveled.
Holmes' former partner and ex-Theranos executive Sunny Balwani was also convicted of defrauding investors and sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison. He started serving his sentence in April at FCI Terminal Island prison in San Pedro, California.
