Ethan Baron
The Mercury News
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) As Ethan Baron reports, Holmes is “charged with allegedly bilking investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and defrauding patients with false claims that the company’s machines could conduct a full range of tests using just a few drops of blood, when she knew the technology had serious accuracy problems.”
San Jose
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ fate is now in the hands of the eight men and four women on the jury in her criminal fraud trial.
Holmes, a Stanford University dropout who founded the defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup at age 19 in 2003, is charged with allegedly bilking investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and defrauding patients with false claims that the company’s machines could conduct a full range of tests using just a few drops of blood, when she knew the technology had serious accuracy problems.
The charismatic Holmes, 37, has been on trial on 11 felony fraud counts since early September, with the proceedings attracting nation-wide attention, and large numbers of media and spectators arriving in the early morning hours to vie for 34 spots in the socially distanced main courtroom. Jurors have taken in testimony from 32 witnesses — including patients, investors, company insiders, and Holmes as her own primary witness in her own defense — and hundreds of displayed emails, text messages and published materials.
