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.
I don’t know her, but if the allegations are true, she may very well have done near anything to avoid abuse… including lying and falsifying documents. So long as it meant another day of peace from the abuser.
I would recommend reading "Bad Blood". She fired that guy and cut him out of her life and continued to be the CEO and lie. But that doesn't really matter, all that matters is that she gets 12 people on the jury that agree that "Maybe" she had to commit fraud. And she will be off to her next scam
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?
> Holmes founded Theranos in 2003, Balwani joined in 2009.
They met in 2002:
> Balwani and Holmes met in Beijing on a trip through Stanford University's Mandarin program the summer before Holmes went to college. While there, the two struck up a friendship. While it wasn't clear when Balwani and Holmes became romantically involved, it appears to be around the time she dropped out of Stanford to start Theranos.
Also if you read "Bad Blood", in one of the early parts where she is accused of fraud in blood testing, her response is to plan to tell a story of how she was raped. This is a non-sequitir and damaging to real victims of rape.
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.
Even if there were evidence for this, heinous criminals AFAIK historically haven't been being set free just because they themselves had been abused some time before they committed their crimes. That line of reasoning is just not something that's likely to yield a welcome result for her.
Do you have evidence of this? I’m not asking because I don’t believe you, but because it seems incongruous with my understanding of how rape tends to have an extremely low conviction rate and overwhelmingly the victims of rape are women. I’d be interested in knowing the factors of how both the notion of “courts will side with a woman without evidence” and also “rape has an extremely low conviction rate” exist.
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.
Considering Theranos' board (powwerful males) decided to remove her, but she somehow convinced them to NOT remove her, but also to give her more authority, then the defense can argue she was not coerced. Rather she is the coercer
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.
If that fails she can become transgender and then go through the jurors to find one who has ever said anything negative about any trans issue ever and say they are biased and the case should be throw out.
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"?
> and business methods of sociopathic entrepreneurs
This being, IMO, the most important part. Holmes is not a Martian; she's a product of SV culture. While her scam was particularly brazen, I saw a ton of small things in _Bad Blood_ that I also saw in various founders and execs in startups I've worked for.
The disturbing thing is that her behavior, while extreme, is just that - an extreme on a fairly smooth gradient. A lot of successful firms have people who have done some nasty, gross stuff to get there.
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.
I wonder if she will artifically make her voice lower during the trial.
Ever hear the recording of her where she accidentally forgets to make her voice lower and she is talking in her normal voice?
She will likely use a much more meek voice if this is her defense... the whole lowering of her voice was a calculated tactic to appear more "respectable" and such...
Ding ding ding, we have a winner. I would love to see the voice recordings of the trial. Cuz you are dead right on the voice manipulation for the effect.
Its a bit shocking how many people here are defending her. But white collar crimes are not 'crimes' i guess just misunderstandings.
