Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes lost her bid to overturn her fraud conviction on Monday – less than two weeks after she whined to People magazine about her jail stint being “hell and torture.”
Holmes and Theranos President Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were found guilty in 2022 of defrauding investors in the failed blood testing startup once valued at $9 billion.
A three-judge panel for the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco rejected claims of legal errors at their separate trials.
She can now petition for another review of her case or try to petition the Supreme Court – though the lost appeal was likely her best chance at getting the conviction tossed out.
“Both are long shots,” appellate lawyer Raffi Melkonian told The Wall Street Journal. “Now that she’s lost, her pathways to winning the case have narrowed substantially.”
Holmes, 41, is currently serving an 11-year sentence at an all-female, minimum-security prison in Bryan, Texas.
Earlier this month, the former Silicon Valley darling gave a teary interview lamenting her prison visits with her two young children. She said the hardest part of serving time was watching her kids leave through the secured glass door each week.
It “shatters my world every single time,” Holmes told People.
She shares her two children with partner Billy Evans, heir to the Evans Hotel Group.
Holmes maintained her innocence during the People interview , saying she is “walking by faith and, ultimately, the truth. But it’s been hell and torture to be here.”
Holmes – once seen as a new Steve Jobs for her entrepreneurial gusto and black turtleneck collection – appealed her guilty verdict shortly after US District Judge Edward Davila denied her case a new trial.
Her lawyers filed a 130-page document with the appeals court, slamming Davila’s decisions throughout the trial, including what testimony he allowed to be heard by the jury.
The San Jose, Calif. trial started in August 2021 and lasted nearly four months. More than 30 witnesses, including Holmes, testified.
Holmes launched Theranos at age 19 after dropping out of Stanford University. She ran the company for 15 years.
She claimed Theranos – which employed hundreds of scientists and engineers – had developed a groundbreaking proprietary device that could speedily deliver results on more than 200 health tests.
Reporter John Carreyrou, then a journalist at the Journal, exposed that the blood tests were not being run on proprietary devices, but commercial blood analyzers that had been tampered with to handle minute amounts of blood.
Theranos, Holmes and Balwani, her then-boyfriend, were charged with civil-securities fraud in 2018.
Holmes was charged with 11 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud against investors and patients. She was convicted on three of the fraud counts and one count of conspiracy.
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