Opening statements begin today.
Few things have captured the public’s imagination in recent years like the saga of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the defunct blood-testing company Theranos. The downfall of Holmes, a Stanford dropout and Silicon Valley darling, spawned not only wall-to-wall news coverage, but also a documentary, a book, a podcast and even a mini-series based on that podcast. Her tale offers something for everyone: clueless bigwig investors, wild false promises, black turtlenecks and — let’s be real — more than a small dose of schadenfreude. This morning, the drama is set to continue with opening statements in Holmes’s trial in federal court in San Jose, my colleague Erin Griffith reports. Holmes has pleaded not guilty and would face up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Here’s what you need to know: Holmes started Theranos in 2003, when she was 19. The company was based in Palo Alto and promised to revolutionize health care by detecting diseases using a single drop of blood from a finger prick. At one point, it was valued at $9 billion. But Holmes’s empire came tumbling down after a Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 raised questions about whether Theranos’s technology actually worked. (It didn’t.) In 2018, Theranos was dissolved. That same year, Holmes and Theranos’s former president, Ramesh Balwani, were indicted on charges of defrauding investors out of millions of dollars as well as deceiving hundreds of patients and doctors. Holmes has been charged with 12 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She has been accused of knowing that Theranos blood tests were unreliable, of harming patients who relied on them and of overstating the company’s business deals and performance. The jury consists of seven men and five women who live in Northern California. There are also five alternates. The group was selected last week from a pool of 200 potential jurors.
