Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty of criminal fraud for her role in building the blood-testing start-up Theranos into a $9bn company that collapsed in scandal. Picture: BLOOMBERG
Holmes was convicted of four out of 11 counts of conspiracy and wire fraud and acquitted of four counts. The jury didn’t reach a verdict on three of the counts. Holmes was found not guilty of all charges pertaining to defrauding patients. The panel of eight men and four women also heard colourful accounts from several Theranos employees about the company’s lab taking dangerous shortcuts to conceal shortcomings with the analysers, and from patients who recounted receiving inaccurate test results that left them anxious about their health.
In seven days on the witness box, Holmes alternated between deflecting blame, failing to remember certain events and accepting responsibility for mistakes, even while insisting she didn’t intend to deceive anyone. Holmes’s defence team tried to convince the jury that she made a sincere effort over 15 years to steer Theranos to success and shouldn’t be punished for failing to achieve her dream. “Elizabeth Holmes was building a business and not a criminal enterprise,” attorney Kevin Downey told jurors.
“Her personality defences failed completely,” Weisberg said. “Her claims that she was psychologically undone by Sunny Balwani and so on, because of the conviction on the major fraud counts, it’s clear that those defences failed, and if she avoided conviction on other grounds they were on technical matters.”