Elizabeth Holmes to Accuse Ex-Boyfriend of Abuse at Trial

I have to award creativity points for the defense. If it is true it is terrible and I'm sorry it happened to her. However it's a bit of a stretch to see how it would directly translate into bold faced lying to your investors and falsifying documents all along the way. It's not like she was a shrinking violet who had no drive and charisma of her own.

Holmes founded Theranos in 2003, Balwani joined in 2009.

Is she going to argue that the lying to investors increased after Balwani joined? Because isn't it the case that she lied to investors from day 1 of Theranos existing?

Based on the book it was clear her legitimate sounding original business idea as a university kid, which put her in way over her head pretty fast, started to get scammy around the time Balwani signed on.

Balwani was also the guy all the employees talked about in most interviews as being the most malicious and firing people almost daily for trivial reasons. Elizabeth was always presented as hands off and kept to the office, only dealing with investors.

But even if Balwani was say 75% to blame, being even 25% to blame (which I highly doubt) with such a serious scheme it’s still no joke and seriously harmed both investors and their countless employees who bought into her idea.

She was the face of the business and always the critical piece of gaining investments and legitimacy from the press.

Her built up connections to politicians and Washington power-brokers was the reason Theranos lasted as long as it did. There’s no way she wasn’t fully aware that her vaporware needed a miracle to translate to anything real. Lying to yourself for years is no excuse, even if you believed it.

Holmes directly played a role in building the fake blood sampling presentations and schemes to hide their “real” lab from regulators with a carefully built office layout.

This is basically just buying her more time, which is all she ever did at Theranos. Reality will come soon enough I hope.

This whole things sounds like a young, interesting, smart, and PR-hyped CEO, chosen by a group of activist investors and run by an activist board. This one is just a big one. There are tons of little ones, with talented but naive young people ostensibly leading them, but actually beholden to the board even for mundane facets of operating the business. There's immense pressure to show progress, and sometimes the implication is do or die. Not surprised at all that a research-based project doesn't progress as quickly as the investors want, so the "management" fudges things.

"... plans to defend herself at her federal fraud trial starting next week by arguing that her ex-boyfriend, who was an executive at the company, emotionally and sexually abused her, impairing her state of mind at the time of the alleged crimes, according to newly unsealed legal filings in her case."

She better have some really damn solid evidence otherwise the "he said, she said" of this is going to get nasty, and if her character and behaviour regarding a public company is how she behaves in her private relationships - this will more likely unfold as that she's actually the abusive one in the relationship; much like how Amber Heard claimed Depp was the one abusing her, in fact there's video and audio evidence of her abusing him including causing an injury to a finger of his that he had to have sewn back on; not to mention the untold amount of harm done to his reputation who still believe her story over his, and loss of revenues from cancelled/lost movie contracts.

She could just accuse her neurons, much easier to prove that they maliciously controlled her.

Not legally an insanity plea, but FWIW it is an insanity plea - one that pleads that her actions were carried out by some agent of mental incapacitation.

Mr. Balwani is far from being any angel, but this sham show seems outrageous.

She may get away with this, depending on the women on the jury who are likely to be sympathetic.

Imagine if a man tried the defense to a crime "my girlfriend abused me."

Here we go, it’s all his fault, she was just an innocent young woman. There’s a lot of talk that she will get away with it.

Probably something along the lines of "Due to her PTSD Ms. Holmes felt that she had to make investors (who were mostly men) happy." And "she felt that she couldn't question her employees when they seemed to be lying."

So really what happened here is that a victim of men was just a messenger between the fraudulent employees and the demanding investors.

What’s the connection between her being abused and her defrauding investors?

Have nothing to say on the veracity of what she is alleging but does she really expect anyone to believe her?

No better defense for a girl in 2021 to say she was somehow "victim" of some men.

Why is this story on HN? It might well be true for all we can know about it, but how exactly does this pointless gossip "gratify intellectual curiosity"?

Up next: after her acquittal, Holmes will launch a new legal startup, Alibi.

John Carreyrou, the WSJ reporter who first broke much of the Theranos story, just came out with a podcast called Bad Blood the Final Chapter that’ll follow the court case and other recent developments

Reading Bad Blood, it's pretty obvious that there was some form of abuse going on in that relationship. That doesn't mean that she isn't guilty as hell, though.

Sociopaths fascinate me.

I'm sure that defense could work. It's even moderately working in this very thread.

I see that she's now married to a rich guy and has a child. You could made a Gone Girl 2 movie based on her life.

A couple of years late for the "Me Too" fad; but, in the right venue that angle might have some impact.