Theranos founder Holmes back on the witness stand in fraud trial
BNN Bloomberg
Elizabeth Holmes was back on the witness stand Tuesday at her criminal fraud trial in San Jose, California, as a federal prosecutor resumed cross-examination of the Theranos Inc. founder following a one-week recess.
Elizabeth Holmes was back on the witness stand Tuesday at her criminal fraud trial in San Jose, California, as a federal prosecutor resumed cross-examination of the Theranos Inc. founder following a one-week recess.
Holmes, 37, spent four days answering questions from her defense lawyer, culminating on Nov. 29 in a tearful description of a decade of alleged abuse by her former boyfriend, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who was her second-in-command at Theranos. Holmes also said she’d been raped while a student at Stanford.
Prosecutors spent 10 weeks laying out the case against her, claiming the startup she founded was built on lie after lie. Theranos, which peaked at a valuation of US$9 billion, collapsed in 2018. Holmes is accused of deceiving investors, board members and companies about the capabilities of Theranos blood-testing devices. She faces as long as 20 years in prison if convicted.
Holmes Revisits Fortune Profile (2 p.m. NY)
Holmes said she wishes she’d taken a different approach to the magazine cover story that made her famous in 2014 when confronted on the witness stand with multiple inaccuracies in the story about the capability of Theranos technology.
The startup founder was asked by prosecutor Bob Leach whether it was true when the article by Roger Parloff was published in Fortune that the startup was able to run 200 different blood tests -- and was ramping up to offer more than 1,000 tests -- all without the need for a syringe and without relying on analyzers by other companies.
