SAN FRANCISCO — Convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes requested a new trial Monday, saying a star prosecution witness showed up at her home and felt she “did something wrong.“
Holmes is due to be sentenced in October after a jury found her guilty of defrauding investors in her blood testing startup Theranos earlier this year.
Holmes is a rare example of a tech executive caught up in a booming business in an industry littered with the carcasses of losing companies that once promised untold fortunes.
His case highlighted the blurry line between the frenzy that characterizes the industry and blatant criminal dishonesty.
But lawyers for Holmes said former Theranos lab director Adam Rosendorff, who was part of the prosecution case, arrived unannounced at her California home in August looking disheveled and said that he had to talk to her.
“He said he felt guilty, it looked like he was in pain,” Holmes’ partner William Evans said of Rosendorff in a court filing.
“He said when he was called as a witness, he tried to answer questions honestly, but prosecutors tried to make everyone (at the company) look bad.”
Evans said he turned Rosendorff away from the home he shares with Holmes and their young son, telling Rosendorff Holmes couldn’t talk to him.
“He said he thought it would be healing for him and Elizabeth to talk,” Evans said.
THERANOS DIFFERENT VERDICT?
Evans told Rosendorff that he and Holmes were just starting their careers when they worked on Theranos together, and “everyone was working so hard to do something good and worthwhile.”
Holmes had promised to revolutionize health diagnostics with self-service devices capable of performing a series of tests using just a few drops of blood, a vision that attracted high profile supporters and made her a billionaire on paper at the age of 30.
She was hailed as the next tech visionary on magazine covers and raised mountains of money for investors, but it all came crashing down after the Wall Street Journal cover revealed the machines weren’t working. as promised.
The jury found her guilty on four counts of investor fraud.
But the jury also acquitted her on four counts and failed to rule on three others.
The 38-year-old now faces decades behind bars.
Holmes’ lawyers argued that Rosendorff was a key witness for prosecutors and his testimony called into question the guilty verdict.
“If Dr. Si Rosendorff’s jury had heard that the government was looking for evidence to make things look worse than they were and everyone was doing their best and working hard to do something right and significant, the jury would have viewed this case very differently,” Holmes’ attorney Amy Mason Saharia said in the filing.
Holmes is calling for a new trial, or at least a hearing in federal court in Silicon Valley, to further investigate what Rosendorff wanted to tell her at home, attorneys said.
“He said he wanted to help her,” Evans said of Rosendorff.
- Editor/ additional report by AFP
