Elizabeth Holmes’ Story of Theranos’ Rise and Fall

The wait is over.

Three years after her very public fall from grace, Elizabeth Holmes is finally getting the chance to tell her story. The truth, or so she claims (her version of it, anyway).

Few are unfamiliar with Holmes’ saga: The tale of the Steve Jobs wannabe who dropped out of Stanford University at 19 to start a company offering “revolutionary” blood testing technology has been chronicled at length in newspapers, magazines, books, podcasts, and film, with Hollywood casting both Amanda Seyfried and Academy Award-winner Jennifer Lawrence as the baritone-voiced business executive.

Holmes, as the story goes, founded her company Theranos in 2003, envisioning a way to diagnose more than 100 diseases and conditions—from cancer to cholesterol—from a single drop of blood. Though she lacked formal medical training and a college degree, Holmes convinced scientists, former government bigwigs, and wealthy investors to support her innovation; the Theranos board included Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, and James Mattis, while backers like Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family (Walmart) helped boost the company’s valuation to $10 billion by 2015.

Attracting such high-level support was relatively easy for Holmes, as she exploited the benefits of good timing and gender inequity to build her fairy tale-like empire. She fit the mold of the young, genius startup founder who could do no wrong.

“She was going to be the first woman who reached billionaire status and join the pantheon of tech leaders,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou told The Guardian (Britain) in late August. “People were really rooting for her—young girls were writing her letters. A lot of people wanted to believe this fairytale, because it would have represented real progress in this very male-dominated world of Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, it was a fairy tale that wasn’t true.”  

Carreyrou, in fact, was instrumental in unraveling that fable. His investigative report in The Wall Street Journal exposed the truth behind the Theranos mythos—that its secretive, “revolutionary” technology was highly inaccurate and didn’t work, that its equipment failed quality control measures, and that management deliberately worked to conceal its failures.

That was the beginning of the end for Theranos and Holmes. In 2018, Theranos collapsed, leaving the former Silicon Valley darling to face a very unhappily-ever-after future of hefty fines, a 10-year ban in corporate management, and a dozen federal fraud charges that carry a maximum 20-year prison term.

Holmes, not surprisingly, has denied any wrongdoing in her company’s epic rise and fall. She’s pleaded not guilty to the fraud charges, a decision that practically guarantees her the opportunity to share her side of the Theranos story.

Savvy move on Holmes’ part, given the nature of her story.

In court filings submitted ahead of her federal trial in San Jose, Calif., Holmes’ legal team claims she was a victim of abuse by her business partner and former boyfriend, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.

Theranos’ former chief operating officer, Balwani faces identical fraud charges but will be tried separately from Holmes early next year. Like Holmes, he has pleaded not guilty.

The court documents accuse Balwani of a “pattern of abuse and coercive control,” and TIME magazine reported that Holmes claims she experiences “debilitating PTSD symptoms” simply by being near him.

“Out of hundreds of securities fraud cases, I have never seen this defense,” John C. Coffee Jr., a Columbia Law School professor and expert on Silicon Valley fraud cases, told TIME. “There is a timing problem in her story. She was an extraordinary success on her own without Sunny.”

Nevertheless, Holmes’ legal team claims Balwani controlled her every move and psychologically manipulated her throughout their decade-long relationship (the pair met when Holmes was 18 and Balwani was 37). Holmes contends Balwani dictated her meals, fashion, personal spending, hours of sleep, and social engagements; he also allegedly monitored her phone calls, texts, and emails. Moreover, Holmes claims Balwani verbally disparaged her and physically abused her, reportedly throwing “hard, sharp objects” at her, TIME reports.

Balwani’s attorneys have denied Holmes’ abuse accusations, calling the allegations “deeply offensive, devastating personally to him, and highly and unfairly prejudicial to his defense” in court filings.

The federal government, however, isn’t buying Holmes’ story. On the first day of her federal trial last month, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Leach painted Holmes as a liar and misled investors to deliberately keep her sham company afloat.

“Out of time, out of money, Elizabeth Holmes decided to lie,” Leach said. “This is a case about fraud, about lying and cheating to get money. She owned it, she controlled it, the buck stopped with her,” Leach said.

Did it really stop there? Not in Holmes’ version of the story.

Regardless of where the buck ultimately stopped, Holmes’ attorneys claim she is guilty of nothing more than honest mistakes. “Mistakes are not crimes,” said Lance Wade, one of Holmes’ attorneys. “A failed business does not make a CEO a criminal. Ms. Holmes did not go to work every day intending to lie, cheat and steal… failure is not a crime. Trying your hardest and coming up short is not a crime.”

Depends on the story. And the storyteller.