Elizabeth Holmes' defense preparing her biggest con-job yet

 

Just in case you haven’t been paying attention, in the case of The U.S. vs. Elizabeth Holmes, et al, the young, attractive, blonde, white female tech wunderkind whose face was plastered all over the media and on magazine covers for years

 

 

now finds herself in the following mess:

Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani are charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud. According to the indictment, the charges stem from allegations that Holmes and Balwani engaged in a multi-million-dollar scheme to defraud investors, and a separate scheme to defraud doctors and patients. Both schemes involved efforts to promote Theranos, a company founded by Holmes and based in Palo Alto, California. Theranos was a private health care and life sciences company with the stated mission to revolutionize medical laboratory testing through allegedly innovative methods for drawing blood, testing blood, and interpreting the resulting patient data.

Holmes and Balwani are accused of making “numerous misrepresentations to potential investors about Theranos’s financial condition and its future prospects.” Theranos claimed that by 2015 it would generate $1 billion in revenue when it knew it was bringing in only a “negligible” amount. Theranos is accused of falsifying test data with their “Edison” blood-testing machine, and failing to inform clients and patients when they used third-party testing equipment for accurate data. “The defendant knew Theranos was not capable of consistently producing accurate and reliable results” for a wide range of diseases, including HIV—and could find diseases that didn’t exist, like prostate cancer in women.

The ensuing trial has been an endless stream of testimony from lab workers and supervisors about warnings that test results were not accurate, that the “Edison” machine would not and could not work as claimed, that Holmes pressured them to ignore misleading test results, that a former lab director—who has been made a “scapegoat” by the defense—felt compelled to void two years’ of worthless test results from the Edison machines, which were never again used for testing. That investors who sought “clarification” about the state of the company were threatened and insulted by Holmes, while these same investors and the Theranos board of directors was—like the media—held in such “thrall” of Holmes’ “celebrity” that they failed to do their “due diligence” to determine whether Theranos was in fact a legitimate concern backed by peer-reviewed studies, which it never was. Theranos was forced to shut down upon the determination that false test results placed patient health and safety in jeopardy.

Holmes was once a 19-year-old Stanford University dropout who had a big idea, but whose principle talent was megalomania and self-promotion. It certainly helped that she was a young, attractive blonde white female, with plenty of “sugar daddies” and gender activists who wanted to be a part of her success. She was going to “revolutionize” the medical industry by creating a technology that could perform dozens of tests with a single drop of blood with this machine, rather presumptuously called the “Edison”:

 

 

So many people were hoodwinked that Theranos (named after a Greek god) was at one time valued at near $10 billion even though it never generated more than a tiny fraction of that in revenue, and mainly from agreements with the likes of Walgreens, which initially used the machines for tests before they discovered they were worthless. After an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Holmes was fined $500,000 and forced to give up her worthless Theranos stock, and banned from serving as an executive officer in any company for 10 years.

The problem seems to be that Holmes was someone who had this “fantastic” idea that would make her world famous and an instant billionaire. Of course her idea should have raised red flags instantly; if it could be done, why hadn’t been done already? Holmes was no tech “genius”; she was just someone who thought that other people could translate her “vision” into reality, and all she had to do was be some kind in infomercial guru who could convince people to give her a lot of money, and who would be given more “seriousness” for the simple fact that she was am attractive white woman who people wanted to see succeed for political reasons.

Holmes did have this fantastic idea—but emphasis on “fantastic” as in “fantasy.” She convinced wealthy and politically-connected donors and board members like Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Gen. James Mattis and even Rupert Murdoch to give her all that money, and she brought in people eager to bring her fantasy to fruition—before they discovered that there was nothing “there” there. Holmes ignored internal warnings that her fantasy was just that, it was simply not possible to build the machine she envisioned that would make her dream of being a celebrity billionaire “inventor” on par with other tech “giants” a reality. When this all proved to be a fantastic hoax, she couldn’t face the truth and continued to lie and misrepresent, hoping to the end that some “miracle” would happen that prevented her dream from becoming a nightmare, which it would be for those gullible investors who lost everything.

And yet after all of this, there are those who believe that Holmes might actually get away with all of this, or perhaps be convicted of just a few minor infractions. Holmes certainly has her mindless female supporters, such as those still believing in at least the “idea” of her, as seen in “girlboss” products such as this that are still being sold without a trace of irony or embarrassment:

 

Despite the fact that investors were told by Holmes herself that she was the “ultimate decision-maker” at Theranos, and she herself made that assertion in a video deposition before the SEC, it now seems that her defense team is hoping to play the attractive-young-blonde-white-female-victim card, claiming that she was sexually and emotionally abused by former boyfriend and Theranos executive Balwani, who is to be tried separately; he of course denies these allegations.

Some are not buying Holmes new line of “defense.” Vivia Chen in Bloomberg writes that Holmes has “exploited every trope of modern womanhood and she’s not done. Will the jury see through Elizabeth Holmes’ shenanigans or will her privilege carry the day? I’ll say this much for her: She sure knows how to play the gender game…First, she was the wunderkind of tech—the girl genius who socked it to the boys in Silicon Valley with her revolutionary medical invention. She epitomized the Lean-in ethos of the era: She ‘sat at the table (actually, at the head of the table) and ‘faked it until she made it’—taking the mantra to a whole other level.”

Holmes is now trying to be the “victim of the patriarchy,” notes Chen. Once the cover girl of the “women, will and lead” movement, Holmes now wants to be known as just another “MeToo” victim. But once she was the “avatar of white female privilege; let me be blunt” writes Chen: “Could Holmes have duped so many high-profile people (men, mainly) and risen to such ridiculous heights (at one point she was worth $4.5 billion) if she didn’t have the white woman card in her deck? And this will be her ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card too?”

Chen notes that John Carreyrou, whose Wall Street Journal report first broke the fraud that was Theranos wide-open in 2015, has observed that Holmes is trying to play not just the “Svengali defense,” but a racist one as well. Balwani was twice her age when they met, he is Pakistani, while Holmes is the “white maiden being menaced by the sinister dark man”: 

 

 

Melissa Murray of NYU Law School makes the same charge; now that she is “on the ropes,” Holmes “now claims that she was enthralled by this older man of color. Her defense is how could anyone resist this magnetic, exotic man…which plays into the fetishization of people of color.”

Chen writes that Holmes “is polishing her damsel in distress act. For starters, she’s no longer wearing her Steve Jobs black turtleneck and pulled-back hair...

 

...Her hair now flows loosely around her face, and she’s wearing light colored blouses":

 

Holmes has also been bringing her entire well-healed family to court, as well as a diaper bag to “remind” jurors that she is a new “mom”—and they can’t send a “mom” to jail, can they? For a born fraudster and con artist like Holmes—who tried to “masculinize” her voice to give herself more “credibility”—this could be her biggest con yet, especially when she reverts to her natural, “feminine” voice if she goes on the witness stand to tell her sob-sister tale. Will the jury buy it? We have been told that jurors have been dismissed because of boredom or their “religious beliefs” prevents them from sending an attractive white woman to jail (you know the "syndrome"). 

Despite the avalanche of evidence against her, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by anything that happens. I wouldn't even be surprised if Holmes decided to have a baby so close to the trial date, knowing she faced 20 years in prison, as part of the "con."