CA, E Holmes & R Balwani (Theranos) June 2018 - Wire Fraud **MEDIA ONLY - NO DISCUSSION

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Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos trial: What to know about the hotly anticipated case

How can I watch the trial?

The trial officially begins Sept. 7, with opening arguments expected the following day.

Judge Edward Davila is set to preside. There won't be an online feed of the trial, and television cameras won't be allowed in the courtroom, so the best way to follow the case will be via reporters in the room taking notes the old-fashioned way.

Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, former Theranos COO and Holmes' onetime boyfriend, faces similar charges in a separate trial scheduled for next year.

Both Holmes and Balwani have pleaded not guilty.
 


Yasmin Khorram@YasminKhorram

My interview with ⁦⁦
@JohnCarreyrou
⁩ as he gears up for Bad Blood: The Final Chapter. His predictions on why Elizabeth Holmes will likely be found guilty, who she will throw under the bus (hint: an ex) + why her trial will be a major wake up call



Reporter who broke Theranos scandal predicts outcome of Elizabeth Holmes trial
CNBC interviews John Carreyrou about his new podcast on the criminal fraud trial of former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes.
cnbc.com

12:15 PM · Jul 9, 2021·
 
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/01/jur...pshare|com.apple.UIKit.activity.PostToTwitter

Sept 1, 2021

KEY POINTS
  • A jury in the Elizabeth Holmes fraud trial is expected to be finalized by Thursday from 41 prospective jurors chosen after two days of intense questioning.
  • The 12-person panel of jurors with five alternates will likely be sworn in after they are seated next Wednesday.
  • Opening statements for the case are expected to begin Sept. 8.
“We will have a sufficient number of jurors in this list to select a jury in this case,” U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila announced after eight hours of questioning in the courtroom on Wednesday.

The 12-person panel of jurors with five alternates will likely be sworn in after they are seated next Wednesday.

[..]

Jury selection comes on the heels of shocking newly unsealed documents that reveal Holmes’ laying the groundwork for a mental health defense. The once outspoken CEO is expected to claim her former business partner and boyfriend, Sunny Balwani, psychologically, emotionally and sexually abused her over a decade. Balwani denies the claims.

The topic of intimate partner violence was discussed with potential jurors.

Davila asked the jury pool on Wednesday about their experience with domestic violence and roughly a dozen raised their hands, sharing their harrowing experiences with the packed courtroom.

Earlier in the day, one prospective juror said if he was selected to be on the jury he would want Holmes to take the stand.

“I think I would like to hear her testimony and hear what she’s going through, her side, her story or her experience,” he said. “For me, it would probably help me understand what’s happening in this trial.”

[..]

Among the excused jurors: a Safeway employee, a man who said his mother-in-law went to prison for fraud and embezzlement and several teachers who expressed hardships due to being understaffed in the pandemic.

Another potential juror admitted to seeing a couple of “online memes and funny images” relating to “a voice thing.” She went on say “people speak differently to different people so I don’t really find that as anything to sway my opinion.”
 
Yasmin Khorram@YasminKhorram

Day 2 of jury selection in Elizabeth Holmes’ trial. One potential juror being questioned says she’s seen online memes about Holmes.. “relating to a voice thing” and adds “people speak differently to different people. I don’t find that as anything to sway my opinion.”

11:20 AM · Sep 1, 2021

Replying to
@YasminKhorram
Another potential juror says he advises startups and has heard a considerable amount of information about Theranos at “cocktail parties during the time it happened.” Says he has strong opinions but will try to be objective.

12:18 PM · Sep 1, 2021

Replying to
@YasminKhorram
One juror says he wants Elizabeth Holmes to testify, “I agree that she’s to be assumed not guilty but I would like to hear her side of the story,” adding “it would help me understand what’s happening in this trial.”

2:50 PM · Sep 1, 2021·
 
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/02/the...olmes-faces-jury-of-seven-men-five-women.html

Sept 2, 2021

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A jury of seven men and five women will decide the fate of Theranos founder and ex-CEO Elizabeth Holmes.

The 12-person panel was selected after two days of intense questioning regarding their knowledge of the failed blood-testing company. If convicted, Holmes could face 20 years in prison


Prosecutors and defense attorneys settled on a diverse set of jurors with regard to race, gender and age. Along with five alternates — two men and three women — the jurors were sworn in Thursday morning at the San Jose, California, federal courthouse. Opening statements are set to begin Wednesday.

[..]

Throughout jury questioning, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila, who’s presiding over the trial, reminded potential jurors about the importance of avoiding media, a particular challenge for a case that’s attracted heavy coverage in Silicon Valley and around the world.

One juror, an older white man, said, “oh boy” after his name was called out to join the jury box.

“Let’s be clear, they know the media is interested in this case,” Davila told the courtroom on Wednesday. He repeatedly told the jurors to “turn off those news feeds.”
 

'Valley of Hype' behind the rise and fall of Theranos [documentary]
8/31/2021
 
Is Elizabeth Holmes In Jail? Theranos Founder Lives Luxurious Lifestyle Awaiting Trial

[..]

The company's rise and fall has been the subject of a book (John Carreyrou's Bad Blood), podcasts, and television shows. (A movie starring Jennifer Lawrence is also in the works.) The latest project is HBO's The Inventor, which follows Holmes from the beginning to her damning 2018 indictment in June.

Today, the entrepreneur awaits trial on charges that could land her a maximum of 20 years in prison. She reportedly lives "in a luxury apartment" and recently got engaged to a young hospitality heir. Here’s what to know about her life today.
[..]

In June 2018, Holmes and former Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were indicted on two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud. The business partners were also in a relationship, which they confirmed in deposition tapes reported by ABC News in January 2019. In the tapes, Holmes said they were together for a "long period of time."
[..]

Holmes and Balwani were also charged by the SEC with “raising more than $700 million from investors through an elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance,” according to a release.

Holmes settled for $500,000 and agreed not to pursue a leadership position at a company for a decade. Balwani plans to fight those charges in court.

Both pleaded not guilty and were released on $500,000 bail. Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison.
 
Among the questions for potential jurors, per a court filing:

  • Do they or anyone close to them have experience in such areas as venture capital investing, finance, blood testing, healthcare or blood testing?
  • Have they ever received any form of medical treatment (including vaccinations) in a pharmacy and/or grocery store? You may recall that Theranos had in-store deals with both Walgreens and Safeway.
  • Have they commented, liked or otherwise interacted on social media with anything relating to Holmes, Theranos or Sunny Balwani? They'll also be asked if they follow any of 15 listed journalists (via Twitter, podcasts, etc), or if they've seen or listened to a list of programs that have discussed the case.
The potential witness list includes former Theranos board members like Jim Mattis, Bill Frist and Henry Kissinger.

DocumentCloud
 
Schemer or Naïf? Elizabeth Holmes Is Going to Trial.

8/30/21

[..]

In 2018, the Department of Justice indicted both her and her business partner and onetime boyfriend, Ramesh Balwani, known as Sunny, with the charges. Mr. Balwani’s trial will begin early next year. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Ms. Holmes’s case has been held up as a parable of Silicon Valley’s swashbuckling “fake it till you make it” culture, which has helped propel the region’s start-ups to unfathomable riches and economic power.
[..]

But the trial will ultimately be about one individual. And the central question will be whether Ms. Holmes was a deceptive schemer driven by greed and power, or a naïf who believed her own lies and was manipulated by Mr. Balwani.

The case hinges on Ms. Holmes’s knowledge of the problems with Theranos’s blood testing devices. Her lawyers could argue that she was merely the start-up’s public face while Mr. Balwani and others handled the technology, legal experts said. They could make the case that the sophisticated investors who backed Ms. Holmes should have done better research on Theranos. And they could say that Ms. Holmes was simply following Silicon Valley’s norms of exaggeration in service of an ambitious mission.

Last year, Judge Edward Davila of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California agreed to separate Ms. Holmes’s and Mr. Balwani’s cases. The move was unusual for such cases, legal experts said, and allows the pair to blame each other with no ability to respond.
 
6 Blood Testing Startups Hoping to be The Next Theranos - The Good Version | BioSpace 1/12/2018

Several years ago, Silicon Valley venture capitalists were champing at the bit to support blood-testing startup Theranos, a company that promised a revolutionary technology that would allow hundreds of diagnostic tests to be accurately performed from a single drop of blood.

The highly-secretive company was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and garner a valuation of about $9 billion before intense scrutiny showed that Theranos’ experimental product did not live up to the hype. Theranos crashed due to a lack of sound scientific results, although the company has been able to continue to secure some financing to stay afloat.

But now other blood-testing companies are hoping their products will fulfill the failed promise of Theranos. Nanalyze put together a list of six companies that have the potential to deliver on blood-testing products and assume the “darling” role Theranos once held with investors.
[..]

San Diego-based Genalyte has developed the Maverick Detection System. That blood-testing system, Nanalyze reported citing company documents, uses silicon photonic biosensors to perform multiple tests off a single drop of whole blood in about 15 minutes.

[..]

Athelas is named for the healing herb in The Lord of the Rings. The company has developed a small piece of tech that can run a blood-cell count from a drop of blood.
[..]

Karius has raised $55 million to support development of its tech. The Karius system requires a full blood-draw but is capable of detecting more than 1,000 infectious diseases by analyzing DNA fragments found in the blood, Nanalyze said.

[..]
 
Opinion | Will Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes' unusual defense strategy work?

Sept 1, 2021

Recently unsealed federal court documents in Elizabeth Holmes’ wire fraud trial revealed a creative legal strategy her defense team may use to try to beat the charges to be weighed by a Northern California jury, whose selection began Tuesday. The documents argue that Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, at one time her boyfriend and the former president and chief operating officer of Theranos, deceived Holmes about the company’s financial models and subjected her to intimate partner abuse.

[..]

Not surprisingly, the federal government wins most of its wire fraud cases. In 2019, 597 of 645 wire fraud defendants pleaded guilty. Twenty-eight were convicted at trial. The total number of defendants who went to trial and were acquitted? Two. Ever wonder why former federal prosecutors are so confident when they’re commenting on television? It’s because they’re all winners. They win almost every single case. That has to feel amazing.

[..]

Holmes’ attorneys will have other strategies, of course: They can argue that what Holmes did wasn’t fraud but “puffery,” part of the “acting as if” culture endemic to Silicon Valley, where billionaires are made by sheer force of will and good, old-fashioned chutzpah.

Ultimately, it will be up to the Northern California jury. Because it's Silicon Valley, it’s likely to be a pool full of people in Holmes’ demographic. They are highly educated, upper-income folks in similar fields. They may be sympathetic to her situation — or they might judge her even more harshly than a jury not familiar with the Silicon Valley gold rush culture.
 
Here's what we could expect in trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes

Sept 4, 2021

"The leading defense we're going to see is that she did not intend to defraud anybody," Soffer said. "The government has to prove that she did. We'll likely hear two arguments in support of that defense. First, she was surrounded by people far more seasoned and experienced than she was...so she relied on them to tell her whether the company was acting fraudulently."

Soffer also says we might hear a defense that Holmes was sexually and emotionally abused by her then-boyfriend, Ramesh Balwani, who is the COO of Theranos.

Watch the video above to see the entire interview
 
Theranos' blockbuster trial starts Wednesday. Whose story will the jury believe?

Sept 7, 2021

[..]

At the heart of the matter are thousands of patients whom Holmes and Theranos are accused of defrauding: a mother misled about her pregnancy, a patient told to stop taking heart medication, and patients who received false HIV-positive results.

Holmes, along with Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, a boyfriend who became president of Theranos, face charges of 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Both have pleaded not guilty.

But ultimately, the case is about stories. Which one the jury believes will decide its outcome.

[..]

Prosecutors allege that “despite their knowledge of Theranos’s accuracy and reliability, Holmes and Balwani used interstate electronic wires to purchase advertisements intended to induce individuals to purchase Theranos blood tests,” according to the indictment, even though they knew the tests could yield “inaccurate and unreliable results” that had been improperly adjusted and generated from “improperly validated assays.”

Holmes' trial was originally scheduled to have started in August 2020, but it was delayed repeatedly by the coronavirus pandemic, the birth of her child in July and Holmes’ attorneys, who have sought to exclude evidence and argued successfully for her trial to be separated from Balwani’s.

According to recently unsealed court papers, Holmes will pin the blame on Balwani, arguing that he was an abusive partner who controlled her actions.
 
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