Elizabeth Holmes’s case is one of the biggest scams in Silicon Valley, with the former CEO on trial for eleven criminal counts including nine charges of fraud and two charges of conspiracy to commit fraud. Now, news has broken that the jury is deadlocked on three of those counts.
Holmes was the CEO and founder of Theranos, which claimed for 15 years that it was working towards—and on track to completing—a test for dozens of diseases and other health conditions with only a single drop of blood. As the company continued to make bolder and bolder claims, they were unable to actually prove those claims true, not to mention fostering a toxic work environment and falsely advertising they did military contract work. (Girl, you had to know someone would call that out.
Now, scammers may never die, but they can get found out. Due to the whistleblowing actions of former employees and the investigative journalism of John Carreyrou, Holmes is now reaping what she sowed.
For the past 15 weeks, prosecutors have tried to prove that Holmes was willing to commit fraud rather than admit her failures, putting the public at risk with false blood test results.
The Guardian reports that U.S. district judge Edward Davila “gave the jury what is called an Allen charge, encouraging them to deliberate further.” If the jury is unable to come to a decision, they will be allowed, under federal rules, to deliver a partial verdict. That would leave Holmes open to be recharged with the remaining three charges at a later time, when the prosecutors would be able to make a better case.
Holmes has maintained that she never attempted to commit fraud and that all her claims were made in the good faith that eventually the tests would work. I may not have been in the room where it happened, but Holmes seems to be a victim of her own ego and delusion. It is one thing to scam people with money and power. It is another to use an opportunity to redefine the health care system to play games.
The saddest part is that, yes, there was a lot of good that could have been done if the technology worked, but nothing Holmes did allowed the best and brightest to work on that—only those who would feed into her mistaken ego, and that is a tragedy.
(via The Guardian, image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
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