Elizabeth Holmes’ Ex-Lover Guilty of Defrauding Theranos Investors
The former blood-testing exec was found guilty for his role in committing fraud at the startup, which he ran with his former lover Elizabeth Holmes.
Brittany Hosea-Small/Reuters
Four months after his trial began, Sunny Balwani, the former president and chief operating officer of Theranos, was found guilty on 12 charges.
The 57-year-old had faced two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 10 counts of wire fraud over his work at the blood-testing startup, which he ran with its founder—and his former lover—Elizabeth Holmes, who was found guilty on four charges in January.
Holmes founded the startup after dropping out of Stanford at age 19, and the company attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, ultimately achieving a $9 billion valuation. But according to prosecutors, its ascent was built on lies.
According to a memo prepared by the Department of Justice, Balwani and Holmes “used advertisements and solicitations to encourage and induce doctors and patients to use Theranos’s blood testing laboratory services, even though… the defendants knew Theranos was not capable of consistently producing accurate and reliable results for certain blood tests.”
The government also claimed that the pair duped prospective investors about the company’s viability.
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Holmes and Balwani were indicted in 2018 and were charged together, though their cases were later separated.
In her pre-sentencing memos, Holmes alleged that Balwani—whom she first met as a teenager—had been abusive during the relationship. She claimed that he “controlled what she ate, how she dressed, how much money she could spend, [and] who she could interact with,” essentially erasing “her capacity to make decisions.”
Holmes further claimed that Balwani monitored her texts, calls, and emails, and that he threw “hard, sharp objects at her,” restricted her sleep, monitored her movements,” and otherwise assumed power over her.
Balwani vehemently denied the allegations.
In January, Holmes was found guilty on four out of 11 charges. Jurors deadlocked on three charges and found her not guilty on the rest. She is scheduled to be sentenced in September.
It remains to be seen whether the pair will receive significantly different sentences, considering the higher number of charges Balwani was convicted on—even though, at least in the press, Holmes had been the face of the company.
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