Elizabeth Holmes Takes the Stand in Criminal Trial: Live Trial Updates – The New York Times

Behind her in the gallery, her mother, Noel, typically sits in a reserved row with a rotating group of family and friends who have come in a show of support. Ms. Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, is sometimes among them.

Attendees are assigned tickets for a limited number of seats, spaced out as a pandemic precaution. Everyone in the courtroom wears a mask except those testifying.

Reporters type carefully on laptops, wary of warnings from the judge that they must have a “silent keyboard.” One juror has complained that clacking noise from keyboards was distracting.

Regular attendees bring seat cushions for the hard wood benches — and to save their seats during breaks. When exhibits are displayed on two large monitors on the sides of the room, those paying attention squint and lean in to read. One reporter uses binoculars.

Ms. Holmes’s testimony on Friday afternoon sent a jolt of adrenaline through the sleepy room. Jurors listened intently. Reporters sent panicked messages to their editors. And the more dedicated spectators who hadn’t yet trickled out for the weekend sat up straight, craning to see Ms. Holmes plead her case.

On Monday, the courtroom was packed as Ms. Holmes testified for a second day and her defense began taking shape.

But representatives from Pfizer and Schering-Plough testified that their companies had never validated Theranos’s technology. (Pfizer’s representative said the company had come to the opposite conclusion.) Nor had they approved of having their logos added to the reports.

On the stand on Monday, Ms. Holmes testified about studies that Theranos did with Merck, AstraZeneca, Centocor, Bristol Myers Squibb and others in 2008 and 2009. One exhibit displayed internal documentation about the success of some of this early work and showed a map of around a dozen cities around the world where Theranos’s machines were used for studies.

Kevin Downey, Ms. Holmes’s lawyer, also showed what he called a peer-reviewed journal that published the results of a study that Theranos did with Stanford University around this time. He did not mention the name of the journal.

In each example, Ms. Holmes’s understanding of Theranos’s technology was that “it performed well,” she testified. In some of the examples, Theranos was paid for its work in the studies.

Throughout her trial, Ms. Holmes’s defense team has tried making the case that there was some truth to what Ms. Holmes told investors.

“The reality of what happened at Theranos is far, far more complicated than what you have heard about Elizabeth Holmes so far,” Lance Wade, another of Ms. Holmes’s lawyers, said in his opening statement at the trial’s start in September.

Not every white-collar case is a tech case or related to start-ups, which means there are only a handful of times each year when someone in Silicon Valley is accused of a crime.

There are a lot of complicated reasons for this shortage of courtroom action.

A frequent explanation is that it is the fault of a lackluster U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco. Few prosecutors come to the Bay Area to make their reputations, and those that do — like Robert Mueller 20 years ago — soon move on to better jobs. Mr. Mueller took over the F.B.I.

It’s not just a local issue. Fighting white-collar crime has been less of a priority for the Department of Justice since the Sept. 11 attacks brought fears of widespread terrorism.

And for all the growing awareness of the power of tech companies, there is little public demand to hold them accountable. When David Anderson stepped down as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California early this year, he did an interview with a radio station. None of the questions from the host or from callers dealt with Silicon Valley.

Mr. Anderson, a Trump appointee, had talked about making Silicon Valley a priority for his prosecutors. His first public appearance was on a panel titled “White Collar Crime in a High-Tech World.” But he was in office for two years, too few to really make an impact. The district has had an acting U.S. attorney, Stephanie Hinds, since March.

Yet another reason is that Silicon Valley is a very rich place. That does not make government prosecutions impossible. But it ensures that top-flight defense attorneys can be brought in, making cases like Ms. Holmes’s neither short nor simple.

Finally, there is a sense in Silicon Valley that failure — whether a company that went under or an investment that was lost — is best kept in the family, far away from prosecutors, regulators and the media. Investors are supposed to be sophisticated, and a case like Ms. Holmes’s can reveal just how foolish and naïve they were. The same is true of employees.

Better to just forget about anything suspicious than allege fraudulent activity. After all, you wouldn’t want to miss out on the next opportunity.

Lawyers for Ms. Holmes, 37, may be betting that their client — who charmed investors and partners as she built Theranos to a $9 billion valuation before it collapsed — will be persuasive and charismatic enough to get 12 jurors on her side.

“They think they are behind, and they have a smart, likable, young, attractive witness,” said Neama Rahmani, who is the president of the West Coast Trial Lawyers and a former federal prosecutor. “And she thinks she’s going to talk her way out of it.”

Ms. Holmes’s testimony may also be the only way to show that she did not intend to deceive anyone, Mr. Rahmani said. She can speak about her relationship with Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, 55, Theranos’s former chief operating officer and her former boyfriend. In court filings, she has said he was emotionally abusive and controlling. He has denied the allegations.

Ms. Holmes, who smiled and appeared relaxed when she took the stand on Friday, may also be hoping to present herself to the jury as a sympathetic figure. She had a baby in July and has showed up to the courtroom carrying a diaper bag and holding hands with her mother.

But by speaking in court, Ms. Holmes is taking a risk. That’s because she has previously made many statements about Theranos — both under oath and in media interviews — which prosecutors can grill her on.

“She’s going to be the best witness for herself, or the worst,” Mr. Rahmani said. “She may just kind of hang herself, so we’ll see.”

Not much is publicly known about Ms. Holmes’s relationship with Mr. Evans. The two were first seen together at the Burning Man festival in 2018, the year that Theranos shut down. Mr. Evans and Ms. Holmes, 37, had a child together in July; she often totes a diaper bag in court.

Mr. Evans often sits with the rest of Ms. Holmes’s family in their reserved row in the courtroom in San Jose, Calif., occasionally leaning over to confer with Noel Holmes during testimony. He and the other members of Ms. Holmes’s entourage keep to themselves and do not interact with the press or the public. He has declined to comment on the trial.

“She did her level best, day in, day out, to make Theranos successful, and she genuinely, deeply believed it would be successful,” Lance Wade, one of Ms. Holmes’s lawyers, said during opening statements.

Theranos, which had been hailed as a successful Silicon Valley start-up, collapsed in scandal and shut down in 2018 after the company’s technology was shown to not work.

Over the first 11 weeks of the trial, Ms. Holmes’s lawyers have repeatedly pushed the first two points of their defense. They have sought to undercut testimony from lab employees by pointing to their advanced degrees and comparing that to Ms. Holmes, who dropped out of Stanford University. They have also attacked investors’ credibility by detailing their lack of due diligence.

As Ms. Holmes, 37, takes the stand for a second day, she may point the finger at Mr. Balwani. In court filings, she has said that Mr. Balwani, 55, was emotionally abusive and controlling during their relationship. Mr. Balwani, who will stand trial next year, has denied the allegations. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Because Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani kept their relationship secret while they worked at Theranos, jurors have heard very little about their interactions. Ms. Holmes’s testimony will likely be jurors’ first real insight into the inner workings of the relationship.

A fraudulent report

In 2010, Theranos created a 55-page report that prominently displayed the logos of the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, Schering-Plough and GlaxoSmithKline. Investors such as Lisa Peterson, who manages investments for the wealthy DeVos family, and Walter Mosley, whose clients include the Walton family, testified that the report had helped persuade them to invest in Theranos.

The problem? Pfizer, Schering-Plough and GlaxoSmithKline had not prepared or signed off on the report. While prosecutors did not establish that Ms. Holmes created the report, witnesses like Daniel Edlin, a former Theranos senior product manager, testified that she had signed off on all investor material.

An investor letter

Theranos spent years discussing with the Department of Defense the possible deployment of its technology in the battlefield, but no partnership materialized.

Yet Ms. Holmes told potential investors in a letter that Theranos had signed contracts with the U.S. military — claims that helped persuade them to invest, the investors testified.

“We really relied on the fact that they had been doing work for pharma companies and the government for years,” Ms. Peterson said.

Internal emails

Emails between Theranos employees made up the bulk of the prosecution’s exhibits. Some of the emails showed when Theranos hid device failures, removed abnormal results from test reports and fudged demonstrations of its blood testing.

In one case, Mr. Edlin asked a colleague for advice on how to demonstrate Theranos’s technology for potential investors.

Michael Craig, a Theranos software engineer, recommended that Mr. Edlin use the demo app, a special setting on Theranos’s devices that said “running” or “processing” if an error had taken place, rather than display the mistake.

The app would hide failures from the client, Mr. Craig wrote in an email.

“Never a bad thing,” Mr. Edlin replied. “Let’s go with demo, thanks.”

“Out of time and out of money, Elizabeth Holmes decided to lie,” he repeatedly declared.

To make that case, prosecutors called 29 witnesses to the stand. They included eight former Theranos employees, six investors, three commercial partners, two doctors and three patients. From a star-studded list of nearly 200 people the government had listed as potential witnesses, the highest-profile person to appear was former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who had served on Theranos’s board.

Prosecutors presented evidence to show that Ms. Holmes perpetrated deceit, including that she knew of technology demonstrations that hid Theranos’s failures and was aware the company made false claims of working with the military. They also showed that Theranos had used a report with a pharmaceutical company’s logo to imply it had that company’s backing, even though the firm had not signed off on the report. Investors and partners testified that those claims had helped persuade them to give Theranos their business and money.

The prosecution also detailed the dysfunction within Theranos’s lab, which handled the blood tests. Theranos had trumpeted its claim that its tests could discern various illnesses in patients with just a drop of blood.

But Adam Rosendorff, one of Theranos’s former lab directors, spent six days on the stand explaining that the tests repeatedly produced inaccurate and irregular results. Other lab directors testified that they had essentially been figureheads; one spent just five to 10 hours at Theranos over his tenure.

Daniel Edlin, a former senior product manager and Holmes family friend, testified that Ms. Holmes had signed off on Theranos’s marketing and investor materials. He also said Ramesh Balwani, the chief operating officer and Ms. Holmes’s onetime boyfriend, who is known as Sunny, had deferred to her when the two of them disagreed.

“Generally, she was the C.E.O., so she had the final decision-making authority,” Mr. Edlin said.

The indictment accuses the pair of engaging in a “scheme, plan and artifice to defraud investors as to a material matter.”

In other words, they are accused of lying about Theranos’s business and technology to get money. The lies outlined in the indictment include claims Theranos made about its relationship with the military and the status of its partnership with Walgreens. Prosecutors also say that Theranos faked demonstrations of its technology and falsified validation reports from pharmaceutical companies and the financial health of its business.

Wire fraud is a felony that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years and potential fines. Theranos also paid a $500,000 fine to settle civil securities fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018. It also settled multiple lawsuits with investors and partners before dissolving that year.

Since the criminal indictment, the cases of Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani have been separated. Mr. Balwani faces trial next year. Further, some of the charges against Ms. Holmes have been dropped and others added. As of today, Ms. Holmes faces 11 counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud.

She has pleaded not guilty.

Ms. Holmes, 37, spent only an hour on the stand before the court closed for the day, so her testimony was truncated. What she discussed were the early days of Theranos and why she had set the company up — and she used the opportunity to present herself in her own terms after her emails, texts and other communications were dissected over the trial’s nearly three months of testimony.

Ms. Holmes’s lawyers have argued that she was merely a young, naïve, ambitious founder who relied too much on others who gave her bad advice. Her lawyers have also hammered on her lack of experience and expertise. But on Friday, she presented herself as an expert on her company’s technology.

She testified about the early days of Theranos, which started out as Realtime Cures in 2003. She testified about a patent she had created while a student at Stanford, which led her to drop out and work on the company full time. She also briefly discussed demonstrations of Theranos’s early technology and the early rounds of investment she raised to develop it.

Ms. Holmes’s lawyers indicated that her initial testimony is likely to take up Monday and Tuesday next week. That means that the prosecution’s cross-examination, which is expected to be lengthy, won’t begin until after Thanksgiving.

Ms. Holmes was the third witness to be called by her defense team.

Her case has captivated the public — and spawned books, documentaries and even a fan club for Ms. Holmes, 37 — because she was a young female entrepreneur in heavily male Silicon Valley and because she appeared to push the boundaries of start-up culture and hubris to the limit.

Her story initially seemed like the stuff dreams are made of. Ms. Holmes dropped out of Stanford University at 19 and founded Theranos, which promised to decipher people’s health problems with just a drop of their blood. The company raised $945 million from famous venture capitalists and from powerful tech and media moguls such as Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch. At its peak, Theranos was valued at $9 billion. Ms. Holmes was lauded as one of the youngest self-made female billionaires.

But it all came crashing down after a 2015 investigation from The Wall Street Journal found that Theranos’s blood-testing technology didn’t work. Theranos shut down in 2018.

Now Ms. Holmes is on trial over a central issue: Did she intentionally mislead doctors, patients and investors as she sought investments and partnerships?

The prosecution spent weeks arguing that Ms. Holmes purposely deceived investors and others while knowing that Theranos’s blood tests were often inaccurate and that the company relied on third-party commercial machines. In opening statements, Ms. Holmes’s lawyers asserted that she was simply a hardworking entrepreneur whose failure to achieve lofty aims did not constitute a crime.

Ms. Holmes vocally defended herself in the media after The Wall Street Journal’s revelations about Theranos. The jury — and public — will be eager to hear directly from her and to see whether she continues that stance or instead points fingers at others, such as her former business and romantic partner, Ramesh Balwani, who is known as Sunny.

The trial has played out inside a courtroom presided over by Judge Edward J. Davila of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, with no live broadcast of the proceedings. Jury selection began on Aug. 31 and the case is scheduled to finish on Dec. 10.