A US court upheld the conviction of the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes for defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars while operating her failed blood-testing startup, once valued at $9bn, rejecting her multi-year appeal. The court also upheld the conviction of Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, once Holmes’s romantic partner and president of Theranos.
A three-judge panel for the 9th US circuit court of appeals in San Francisco rejected claims of legal errors at their separate trials held in 2022.
Holmes, 41, who started Theranos as a college student and became its public face, was indicted alongside Balwani in 2018. The two were tried separately and sentenced in 2022 to 11 years and three months, and 12 years and 11 months, respectively. Holmes was ordered to pay $452m in restitution to investors, but a judge placed the penalty on hold due to her limited financial resources.
Holmes’s sentence has been reduced by more than two years for good behavior while incarcerated, and she is expected to be released in 2032, having served a nine-year sentence.
Holmes’s lawyers, who filed the appeal in April 2023, alleged that her trial had featured improper procedures and evidence.
A US attorney disagreed and in an initial hearing on the appeal in 2024, said that “it was not really contested that the device did not work,” referring to Theranos’s error-prone Edison blood-testing machine. Holmes claimed that the Edison could perform a wide swath of medical tests with a single drop of a patient’s blood, which would have represented a significant advance in biotechnology. Her invention never lived up to her promises.
In advance of the ruling on her appeal, Holmes appeared on the cover of People magazine earlier this month for her first interview since being locked up. She described federal prison as “hell and torture” and said she was “not the same person I was back then”.
“The people I love the most have to walk away as I stand here, a prisoner, and my reality sinks in,” she said of her two young children and her husband.
