A New Home for Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes?

The Elizabeth Holmes story never ceases to amaze.

From prologue to main plot, her tale has had more incredulous chapters than a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” guide.

There are hints of wonderment in Holmes’ backstory: At 7, she designed her own time machine, and by 9, was intent on becoming a billionaire. Written biographical accounts paint Holmes as a fiercely competitive Monopoly player and sore loser who often ran through door screens when opponents were winning. In high school, she started her own business selling computer code translation software to Chinese universities, and, having been privately tutored in Mandarin, was accepted into Stanford University’s summer program well before she turned 18.

An incredible story thus far, no? Most definitely. But it was just the start of Holmes’ magnificent fable.

She founded a company (Real-Time Cures, later renamed Theranos) as a 19-year-old college sophomore, aiming to make blood testing faster, easier, and cheaper, and eventually grew that firm’s value to $9 billion in a little more than a decade with the help of prominent investors who gave Holmes final say on all Theranos matters, and allowed her to keep the details of its blood testing technology secret. Though impossible to know for sure, these investors consented to Holmes’s lending conditions because they likely were bowled over by the company’s ability to run diagnostics for 200 medical conditions from a single pinprick of blood.

“That was a fantastical claim,” former AACC president David Grenache told The Verge late last year. “Any claim like that—that sounds too good to be true—should be approached with a healthy dose of skepticism. I think myself and all of my colleagues just looked at each other and said, ‘No way. That’s not possible. The technology doesn’t exist.’”

The skeptics were right. The technology didn’t exist, despite all of Holmes’s hyperbole. The technology that did exist was neither revolutionary nor accurate. A Wall Street Journal exposé in 2015 uncovered the dark truth behind Holmes’s carefully crafted fairy tale, revealing that Theranos’s technology was limited in scope and produced erroneous test results on malfunctioning machines.

The Journal’s report triggered investigations from several federal agencies that led to “massive” fraud charges against Holmes and Theranos chief operating officer Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. Holmes relinquished financial and voting control of her company, paid a $500,000 fine, and returned 18.9 million shares of Theranos stock. She also agreed to a decade-long ban from the corporate executive world.

Holmes went to trial last fall on wire fraud charges and spilled many of the secrets she had once guarded so vigilantly. Incredible secrets, like her romance with Balwani; his alleged sexual and verbal abuse (which he denied); and her punishing self-improvement plan. Federal prosecutors shared some incredibly damning evidence, too, like Theranos’s exaggerated military ties and its bogus employment contracts with several pharmaceutical companies and foreign governments. 

After listening to nearly four months of testimony, a federal jury in January convicted Holmes of four counts of fraud but acquitted her of four other fraud counts. It was deadlocked on three counts of deceiving investors. Each fraud count carries a maximum 20-year prison term, likely to be served concurrently.

Predictably, Holmes wasted no time in challenging the jury’s decision. Barely two weeks after her Jan. 3 conviction, her legal team sought to seal juror questionnaires from public view in order to examine them for evidence of juror dishonesty, undisclosed past issues, or other issues that may have affected the fairness of her trial proceedings.

Of course, Holmes’s story wouldn’t be complete (or truly astounding) without some plot twists. There have been more than a few of those this year as the former CEO awaited sentencing.

In July, Balwani (her co-conspirator) was convicted of 12 counts of fraud. Next, Holmes asked U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila to overturn her conviction—citing a lack of evidence—and submitted numerous new trial requests based on “new” evidence.

Then in August, a key witness in Holmes’s trial appeared on her doorstep hoping to talk to the disgraced entrepreneur. Although the pair never spoke, Holmes’s attorneys contend the visit undermines the witness’s credibility and trial fairness.

Lawyers for the witness, however, claim the move was simply part of a psychological healing journey. The visit to Holmes’s house was the final stop in a series of visits by Adam Rosendorff, M.D., the former Theranos lab director who helped expose the company’s fraud. Rosendorff visited Theranos’s former Palo Alto, Calif., office and the first Walgreen’s store the company had worked with, only to find both facilities gone.

Consequently, Rosendorff “suddenly felt that a conversation with the defendant was the missing piece” to moving on with his life, his attorneys said in a filing.

Davila postponed Holmes’s mid-October sentencing to question Rosendorff about the visit, and will decide whether the unusual move warrants Holmes a new trial. Holmes, who’s appeared visibly pregnant this fall with her second child (convenient timing), stared at Rosendorff throughout his testimony, occasionally taking notes, according to The New York Times.

Holmes’s sentencing is now scheduled for Nov. 18—barring any further plot twists.

Such twists cannot be ruled out at this point. Holmes is, after all, a master manipulator of truth.