A Key Witness’s Visit to the House of a Child: The Case of Ms. Holmes, an Attractive and Unusual Co-conspirator
The co-conspirator ofMs.Holmes was convicted of fraud in July. Then Ms. Holmes asked the judge to overturn her conviction, citing a lack of evidence, and submitted a flurry of requests for a new trial based on new evidence. At recent hearings over the case, she has appeared visibly pregnant with her second child. And in August, a key witness did something highly unusual in a criminal case: He showed up at her house.
That incident was the basis of her latest attempt to make a difference. On Monday, the 38-year-old, her parents and partner, lawyers, and a scrum of media gathered in a federal courtroom in San Jose, Calif., for a hearing that could open the door to her getting a new trial. The visit by the key witness raised questions about his credibility and the fairness of the trial.
Holmes’ criminal trial was initially delayed from March 2021 to August 2021 because she was pregnant with her first child. She’s been married to her husband Billy Evans since 2019.
Her lawyers argue that she is not a flight risk or danger to the community and they want to delay the sentence to give her time to appeal. It didn’t specify when her second child was born or their gender, but she said she has two young children.
“The government became aware on January 23, 2022, that Defendant Holmes booked an international flight to Mexico departing on January 26, 2022, without a scheduled return trip,” the court filing states. The trip was canceled after the government reported the unauthorized flight with the defense counsel.
Theranos: From a billionaire to a celebrity: An investigation into the reliability of its blood testing device, and how it ended up unraveling
Theranos raised $945 million from an impressive list of investors, including media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Walmart’s Walton family and the billionaire family of former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. At its peak, Theranos was valued at $9 billion, making Holmes a billionaire on paper. She was lauded on magazine covers, frequently wearing a signature black turtleneck that invited comparisons to late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
The company began to unravel after a Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 found Theranos had only ever performed roughly a dozen of the hundreds of tests it offered using its proprietary blood testing device, and with questionable accuracy. Instead, the company used devices from traditional blood testing companies.