Elizabeth Holmes reported for prison yesterday to begin serving an 11 year, 3 month sentence after being convicted on 4 counts of defrauding investors in January 2022. It’s been twenty years since Holmes founded Theranos, the biotech company that promised (and failed) to deliver a myriad of conclusive lab results from a prick of blood, and Holmes’ attempts at appeals, blame shifting, pregnancies and Mexican wedding attendance have led her to a minimum security prison camp 90 minutes away from where she grew up in Houston, Texas:
Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison on Tuesday, capping off a stunning downfall for the disgraced founder of failed blood testing startup Theranos.
Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison last November, after she was convicted months earlier on multiple charges of defrauding investors while running the now-defunct startup.
Her request to remain free on bail while she fights to overturn her conviction was denied by an appellate court earlier this month. Judge Edward Davila, who presided over her trial, ordered Holmes to turn herself in to the Bureau of Prisons by May 30 to begin serving her sentence.
Holmes arrived Tuesday at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in southern Texas, a minimum security prison camp that is approximately 100 miles from Houston, where she grew up before moving to California to attend Stanford.
“We can confirm Elizabeth Holmes has arrived at the Federal Prison Camp (FPC) Bryan in Bryan, Texas, and is in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons,” a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement provided to CNN.
For anyone into often overlooked details, as I am, the NY Times had some interesting reporting on life at FPC Bryan. Holmes will be required to work at the cafeteria or manufacturing facility, where pay begins at $1.15 an hour. (Will this be the first honest wage she earns?) She can put those funds to purchasing a crochet needle ($1.30), yarn ($3.55), a radio ($31.75) or MP3 player ($88.40). With her sentence, she has a shot at buying them all. But before she even gets to work, she may have to take an assessment that will test her abilities in “business, clerical, numerical, logic, mechanical and ‘social.’” PLEASE someone leak the results of her test!! Unfortunately FPC Bryan has had a leak in the past, in the form of 3 inmates who escaped in 2017. One of them is still at large. So before Holmes somehow cons her way out of there, I do hope, as Celebitchy once said, that someone can help her out with her hair.
One last item I’ll leave you with: Holmes had her second baby earlier this year, a girl she and partner Billy Evans named Invicta. As in Latin for ‘invincible’ or ‘undefeated.’ That’s all.
It's incredibly sad that Elizabeth Holmes' children are going to be without their mother in their most formative years because she made the self-serving decision to specifically get pregnant multiple times ahead of her trial in hopes it would keep her from going to prison. pic.twitter.com/9M8wM6ItNB
— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) May 30, 2023
Photos are screenshots from ABC News on YouTube and via social media
There are so many things to say about all this but I’ll just go with: I hope those kids will be better off without her and that’s a whole lot of crochet she’s going to be doing!
@MrsFonzieFace oh those babies are definitely better off far, far away from a sociopathic parent. Perhaps with luck Daddy will see sense and divorce Mummy so they’ll never get to live with her. One can only hope….
The man continued to have babies with her and have a relationship with her and there are allegations that he’s hiding the money. I would not hold out hope that he’s any better. They reek of privilege and arrogance.
I think the Daddy is just as bad as she is – he’s all in with her. His parents on the other hand, apparently they tried to stop him from marrying her.
Ghislaine Maxwell, but not a single predator who used Epstein services, Martha Stewart but no prominent males insider trader,, Elizabeth Holmes but not the WeWork guy or countless other C suite execs who fail up. See a pattern? Not saying she should get off scot free but WHY is it the women who get nailed while men so often get away w murder (Johnny Depp anyone?)
Ghislaine is a monster and so is this one. Martha’s offense was more routine but did hurt the little guy. Lots of men have been prosecuted for insider trading, they just were not famous for a tv show — Jeffrey Skilling, Michael Milken, a bunch of men at Goldman Sachs. I see your point but using two psychopaths to do so is tricky.
James Comey prosecuted Martha Stewart because she was a self-made woman and a huge donor to Democrats. If she had been a Republican donor, Comey would have overlooked his misogyny and not prosecuted her.
Interesting point, but in this case Sunny Balwani (Elizabeth’s partner in crime at Theranos) is currently serving time as well. He got 13 years.
Patriarchy.
She’s just a few miles from my house. We sort of cheered sarcastically that someone so famous is in town. Julia Roberts was the last celebrity (came with Lyle Lovett back in the day.)
And the judge denied her request to remain out on bail pending appeal because she had previously booked a one-way ticket to Mexico and claimed to was to go to a friend’s wedding. Sure, Jan.
What I am gonna say will have nothing to do with this woman in particular but:
It is crazy how much is earned by putting prisoners to work.
And I doubt that money is going directly into money that can be used by the state to help fund important things like infrastructure, schools, hospitals etc.
If there is such a big incentive to have people become imprisoned and thereby becoming subject to becoming very cheap labor, you know that system can be corrupted to have as many people become imprisoned as possible.
The profits from prison labor largely go to big corporations. Exploited labor is the bedrock of the US economy.
I discovered this a few years back and suddenly the US’s appetite to lock so many people away for such long periods of time made more sense.
Exactly. It’s a huge scandal and basically legalised slavery. Most people being used as forced labour are not privileged white women who have caused the level of harm EH caused. Most people in the US prison system are working class black boys and men who are either published disproportionately harshly for incredibly minor misdemeanours, or were badly let down by the education system and left open to child grooming by gangs, or fell into crime due to lack of opportunities.
Slavery never really ended in America.
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
It is 100% slavery and the main reason slavery was never 100% been abolished like people think. This is the exception and it’s an exception because usually it mainly affects a certain demographic and makes millions for those with an interest.
Worse still look at how prisons are run in America. They are mostly segregated and there is no race mixing in dorms. And the leaders of dorms depending on their hierarchy within the system determine how their ‘people’ will live.
The US was founded on religious fanaticism, exploited labor, and unregulated markets. Not much has changed in 400 years.
So true!
And prison contracts should NEVER have required occupancy rates! The state/fed government should never be OBLIGATED to imprison people! It’s a crazy system we have here.
You should watch the documentary The 13th.
Modern slave camps.
11 years for fraud. Nothing for risking thousands of peoples health and bullying staff into completing suicide. Ah, capitalism.
Yup.
Tiny bit of tea – I met Stephen Fry just after he had finished filming the TV series about Theranos. He was talking about how awful it was that they man he played had been driven to suicide in real life. We asked him if he thought Elizabeth was guilty. He said ‘From what I have studied for this part, my opinion is yes.”
Her shenanigans trying to wriggle out of her sentence serve as further proof of her shadiness and dishonesty.
Ooh he’s someone I’d want to chat with! Thank you for that story. I agree, she is 100000% guilty. I think Stephen did well in portraying that man, and how much it was eating him up. What a shame he had to lose his life. It’s her fault.
I’d love to chat with him too, he’s a real treasure
Wow! What was he like?
I absolutely loved his performance in that series. He was incredible. I was left totally heartbroken by his character’s death, even though I knew the story and knew it was coming.
@Roop – he was exactly as you would have expected – absolutely lovely (and terrifyingly erudite)!
Took long enough. Anyone think she’ll try to escape to a country with no extradition? Do we even know if she has any money or is her husband wealthy?
Her husband comes from a wealthy family, but apparently his parents don’t like her and tried to stop the marriage (as they should have!). I don’t know how much of that money is his, though.
She was sentenced six months ago but was allowed to remain free until now because she was pregnant. How many Black and Brown women have given birth in shackles because they were not given the same privilege? The system is so broken.
Yes. And she even got a mini-extension to enjoy the Memorial Day weekend. And unlike poor inmates, she has plenty of money and ability to disappear. This whole thing is a textbook example of rich woman privilege working the system.
People were misdiagnosed and died because of her. She received a light sentence.
Question : Would her idea have ever worked? Was she just greedy and impatient, if she took time for more research and tweaking was her vision ever realistic?
Nope. There was no way it could have worked. The explanation I got from a medical researcher I worked with is that the diseases she was looking for had markers with different sized molecules. There was no way one simple test could have found them all.
Many in the medical professional said what she was proposing was impossible, making it all the more incredible that she bilked so many millions out of investors. A single due diligence call would have saved a lot of people’s money.
@Tacky yup, and she mostly went after investors who were not tech (bio/medical tech or otherwise) savvy. Even those who had people around them to warn them (like General Mathis) didn’t listen to their own people. It still blows my mind that none of these people thought it was a huge red flag that she didn’t have investment from VC specializing in biotech.
No. Right back when she first had the idea at Stanford she took it to one of her (female) professors. She was told, categorically, that it wouldn’t work for a bunch of solid, medical reasons. She went to another (male) professor and persuaded him to back her. He received quite a lot of money for doing so. Right from the inception of the idea, she knew there were problems.
Sad and tragic for her toddlers, but fair in every respect. If Bernard Madoff got a 150-year sentence for depleting people from their life savings, there’s no reason Elizabeth Holmes should get away with it.
On a humorous note, she conned Rupert Murdoch out of 130 million dollars. Karma for hassling the Sussexes?
That’s the one part of this horror story that briefly made me smile, some of the people she conned are truly deserving, Murdoch, Betsy DeVos, etc.
So many lies from this one because of her arrogance and greed. She and her trash company were a threat to public health and man took his life because of her. She then puts on a new persona, marries some rich guy and has babies to avoid prison. When she gets out in less than 11 years her family will be waiting for her and she will live a long life. What a deranged world.
She is absolutely terrible. But this is like the dot com crash, where there was rampant illegality, but only Martha Stewart went to jail. So much criming going on in Silicon Valley, but the woman gets charged and pays the price.
This was completely egregious and put people’s health in jeopardy. Not the same as a Martha Stewart (who I agree was scapegoated while men doing the same thing got/get a big pass.)
Thoughts and prayers “pretty lady”.
My bestie and I used to lament that of course Salmon Rushdie could “wife up “
while in hiding but us 40ish divorcee’s are forever single. This sociopathic bish disproves the theory! How in the world she was able to land an attractive, established man ( and have children) will forever be a complete mystery to me? I really feel for her children, which I guess was her driver….
People are saying they’ll spit up given the length of the sentence, but I am not so sure. I think theirs was always a marriage of some sort of convenience.
She gets to have kids during her child bearing years and maybe that suits him just fine, if even it means he does it alone.
my theory is that she has lots and lots of money hidden away – i cannot fathom a single other reason for anyone to get with her. she’s just gross.
Has it occurred to you that this amount of risk-based foolhardiness, complete disregard for the irretrievable long-term consequences, as well as the self-blinded refusal to assess the repercussions of one’s bold moves, all of which triggered by an unmitigated inability to inhibit the urge to make big money at other people’s expense, accounts for a severe emotional deficiency in the compassion department?
She has inflicted pain to others (business victims, her own kids) AND to herself: how ruthless and masochistic to risk jail time for moneys she won’t able to enjoy! This is a pathology, you know. A lack of integrity and moral compass is one thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Elizabeth Holmes suffered from undiagnosed mild sociopathic tendencies.
@Sugarhere — not sure what your point is? i do think we are much, much more likely to think that wealthy white criminals have a mental disorder.
i also think she was an indulged brat raised without a moral compass. whether she’s an actual psychopath or not, I don’t know, but not all psychopaths end up criminals.
“Not all psychopaths end up criminals”: TRUE, especially when they’re in check, when a positive environment counterbalances their primal instincts, both of which helping raise minimal self-awareness, and thereby impulse control.
The fact that she deemed it absolutely urgent and necessary to procreate twice while knowing her kids would be technical orphans, kind of evidences my point about her undiagnosed mental state: she promised herself she’d experience motherhood? So be it, at the expense of the well-being and proper development of the lives she created. Everything revolves her, the immediate satisfaction of her imperious interest.
Elizabeth Holmes’ navel worshipping is a psychiatric condition that still makes her fit for trial and jail time. That initial pathology, combined with growing up in a family dynamics that promotes profit by any means necessary, and you have the recipe for disaster. In other words, I wouldn’t trust her to work in the prison kitchen abd woyld be terrified to share her cell, because her empathy deficiency makes her potentially life-threatening.
If she was working class white, making under $50K a year she would have been in prison. Pregnant or not. (Money talks)
She has no shame at all. Look at the smug look on her face, she actually seems pleased with the press attention.
She is a dangerous fraud and criminal. Same as Madoff.
25 years to life with no parole. Minimum.
And who is this wealthy man? What fool he must be to become involved with her and to have children with a narc like her.
Does he have no friends or family to warn him away from this vile woman. Too late now for those kids. A sociopath for a Mom.
He would be far from the first man to stupidly marry and have kids with personality disordered woman who acts like she needs saving – lots of men have issues with the white knight complex and don’t want to listen when friends and family warn them (they end up messing up their eventual kids, losing their friends etc in the process, but they don’t seem to see that). OR he secretly wants to act like her but feels constrained so enjoys being the “good guy” while his wife acts crazy.
Given what the book Bad Blood revealed about her, I would say those children might actually be better off without her presence in their formative years. Let’s hope the husband meets somebody new and better in the meanwhile. 😎
She looks so much like Mark Zuckerberg with long hair.
YES!! —And the same cold-fish personality.
I wonder how long until he divorces her.
The Houston bit was intriguing so I read her wiki – she went to St. John’s school in Houston! That’s the Rushmore school, as in Wes Anderson went to St. John’s and made a movie that was a cutesy take on the cutthroat ambition and wealth of everyone who attended. My therapist actually congratulated me for not sending my kid there.
Her dad was a VP at Enron 🤨 and a descendant of the Fleischman yeast empire.
Everyone she recruited for the Theranos board was a wealthy white man.
This woman is the product of her environment. And the environment creates thousands of rich, entitled, empathy-free “strivers” who are born on third base and think their unique genius deserves to be recognized, praised, rewarded handsomely for (non existent) achievements.
Honesty, integrity, truth… These are words to get people to do what you want.
Wealth truly does corrupt. And the corruption amplifies down generations. She’s a classic example but by no means alone.
It’s so rare for women to be the perpetrators of big scams/crimes.
To bring a little levity…this is the same prison where Jen Shah from RHOSLC is doing her time (for stealing millions from the elderly in a telecom scam).
Can someone point me to an article explaining in detail why this woman should be punished so harshly. So many arguments on this thread don’t sit right with me:
– She is a fraudster, she should pay for her crimes -> sure, but how many men have done probably worse and got away with it?
– She had kids to escape prison > how about she had children knowing she was likely to go to prison during her child bearing years?
– Her kids are better off without her > I don’t think any child is better off without their mothers, unless she is abusing them
– Black people prison sentences are so much harsher > Sure, but is it a reason to deprive a mother from her children (I have a black background by the way)
Had to put this out there…I am a mother of young children and feel so much pain for her!
She would not care a tiny bit about you, so I’d save the angst you’re feeling for her. She’s a self-serving monster.
Even the lab director of her company Adam Rosendorff has expressed regrets in testifying against her, knowing that she would be separated from her children.
To me this anger towards her is the anger of all those powerful and rich men who lost money in funding her company and now feel like idiots.
She’s due to serve 85% of an 11 year sentence. Because she has defrauded rich men who did not do their due diligence. People that kill other people serve less time in prison.
@Mirage, she killed people.
@Mirage, if you knew anything about this case you wouldn’t feel an ounce of sympathy for her. She intentionally defrauded all of us, for greed and power. Her test told women they were having a miscarriage when they actually had a healthy pregnancy. Elderly grandmas took the wrong medications….so many injuries, from her lies. Her bullying and physical threatening of company whistleblowers caused one to commit suicide. She intentionally lied to medical regulators and put millions of people’s lives in medical danger. She has no remorse. She’s a disgusting vile piece of human garbage, undeserving of your compassion.
She forced real scientists to pretend that prototypes were being developed and showing promise. It was all a show using and harming real patients to get more money from investors. They actually tested the small samples of blood for some things using legit machines hidden away in another part of their labs. Their own prototypes were for show, black boxes with lights, and any scientist knew they didn’t actually do anything but they better look like they might. The ones who questioned and were reluctant to play pretend in front of funders were threatened and ruined. She flirted and bullied to look a part, she wasn’t a scientist, she dropped out early to get rich and famous on fake health promises even though potential mentors strongly cautioned her that her idea had no basis in reality. She harmed a lot of people and knew it and wanted to continue.
After the insane couple of days I’ve had, thank you, Kismet, it felt great to laugh out loud. I never realized how hilarious a hitch in the pokey could sound.