Holmes, founder of Theranos, faces Securities and Exchange Commission fraud charges and has said she will plead not guilty
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood testing firm Theranos, will have to overcome a new obstacle to her attempt to convince an impartial jury to try her on securities fraud charges: a shortage of possible jurors.
The San Francisco tech executive faces serious felony charges and maintains she has no guilty feelings about bilking investors with false claims. She could spend the rest of her life in prison if found guilty.
Now she’s fighting to sway jurors from the minute they first step into the jury room.
She must overcome allegations in civil claims brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that she and her colleagues allegedly made more than $500m from investors as they billed themselves as the next Genome Company and Oculus Rift. They now face criminal charges of securities fraud and Holmes has promised to be ready to enter a not guilty plea by the time she is forced to stand trial.
But her husband, Patrick McCauley, told reporters, “if she is convicted, obviously she’s looking at a long prison sentence.”
That’s because the SEC argued in a federal district court last week that Holmes must be convicted, if she is to be found not guilty on criminal charges. That’s according to one analyst.
“We will continue to push for an understanding of the critical issues involved in the case and a sensible approach for keeping us and the public fully informed about this trial,” McCann said.
The SEC argued in court that there will be trial-level conflicts of interest among many jurors, including the fact that many could be biased against Holmes as a result of her crime and the publicity it has generated. If multiple concerns are raised about the impartiality of a certain juror or two, Judge Maxine Chesney has been asked to put a temporary halt on the trial proceedings, or move the case to a different courtroom.
Jenkins has told the Guardian she had “absolutely no intention of pleasing anyone by lying about everything”.
She said she and her team followed exactly the rules regarding disclosure. “We never lied about the technology or efficacy of our technology. We knew that the product was not ready for FDA clearance, or FDA approval, and nothing we said ever said anything about that.”
The company’s immediate answer to its doubters was to have a huge Las Vegas party where people were showing up with trays of pounds of doughnuts. It said after that flogging of greed became paramount, and when she was seen on the side of her ground-floor black Escalade in a bikini, then brought to court in a succession of tight dresses, Holmes said it “masked and disguised a very serious problem” and she may have “come off sounding too French, just out of control”.
She told CNN in January that some people would not want her under arrest. “They don’t like people doing bad things. In this society, the financial incentives are very strong, in the financial sector especially. That means that people may feel like we should look the other way, because if they’re taking risks, we’re taking financial risks, too.”
The company’s problems started when FBI agents raided their Palo Alto offices in September 2015. They also then fired Holmes and her long-time top lieutenant, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, and Balwani’s boss, CEO and former finance chief Elizabeth Holmes.
A year ago, Holmes appeared in a New York City court to deny that she knew what was going on at Theranos. She sat in a pre-recorded video in a mirror at a large, round table, at which there was a description of her business model written in large purple-and-orange type. Her expressions showed her discomfort and she mumbled the words with her fingers when the man playing her said she used to be “really bullish”.
