Fraudster Elizabeth Holmes says she is not letting a nine-year prison sentence keep her from breaking back into the healthcare industry.
Instead, the disgraced Theranos CEO tells People from behind bars she has continued to write patents for inventions she believes will revolutionize U.S. healthcare in a way her disgraced startup infamously failed to.
“There is not a day I have not continued to work on my research and inventions,” she said. “I remain completely committed to my dream of making affordable healthcare solutions available to everyone.”
Holmes, 41, has been disparaged as a “con artist” who raked in hundreds of millions of investor money at Theranos, but delivered an egregiously unreliable product. The company sought to screen patients for hundreds of diseases with just a few drops of blood, but a Wall Street Journal exposé revealed it was rife with misdiagnosis—like falsely diagnosing a patient with HIV, another with prostate cancer, and a third with a miscarriage while she was still pregnant.
Fraud charges arrived for the healthcare pariah—who denies committing a crime to this day—three years later. Holmes was acquitted of defrauding customers in 2022 but, along with her co-conspirator Ramesh Balwani, was found guilty of defrauding investors like Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family.
“I refused to plead guilty to crimes I did not commit,” Holmes told People. “Theranos failed. But failure is not fraud.”
Now Holmes spends her days at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas, where People reports she makes 31 cents an hour as a re-entry clerk that helps women write résumés and prepare to apply for government benefits upon their release.
Holmes says she calls family twice a day but has to keep the calls short, as she is allotted just 300 minutes a month. Twice a week, she is visited by her 33-year-old husband, Billy Evans, and the couple’s two young children—aged 3 and 2—that she gave birth to after she was criminally charged.
The women’s prison will be Holmes’ home until April 3, 2032, unless she has her conviction overturned on appeal. She was initially ordered to spend more than 11 years in lock-up, but had two years shaved off for good behavior in 2023. She and Balwani are on the hook for a combined $452 million in restitution.
Holmes told People she already has plans for what to do upon her release. Beyond her dream of breaking back into the healthcare industry, she says she has drafted an American Freedom Act bill—a seven-page handwritten document she hopes will one day bolster the presumption of innocence and change criminal procedure.
“This will be my life’s work,” she told People, adding, “Human beings are not made to be in cells.”
