Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes goes through security at the Robert F. Peckham U.S. Federal Court in San Jose, California, where she is facing charges of conspiracy and wire fraud in connection with the now defunct blood-testing startup.
A federal judge on Monday agreed to delay setting a date for the trial of former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes so that they could review evidence, several news outlets reported.
The outlets reported that prosecutors had sought to convince Judge Edward Davila of the US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose to set a date for the trial, but the defense successfully argued that it needed more time to go through a large number of documents. San Francisco Bay Area ABC affiliate KGO reported that it amounted to some 20 million pages.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the prosecutors declined to say whether they would bring charges in addition to the existing fraud charges against Holmes and former Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, in connection with their allegedly misleading doctors, patients and investors about the results of their blood-testing system. The two face up to 20 years in prison and fines of $2 million each, in addition to having to pay restitution to victims.
Holmes and Balwani are due back in court on July 1 for further discussion of a trial date, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Theranos went from being a celebrated Silicon Valley unicorn worth about $9 billion to crashing down when a series of articles by Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou starting in October 2015 showed that its testing device, the Edison, didn’t work. It was further reported that the company had been using standard lab-testing equipment to perform tests on patients’ blood. Holmes went from a celebrated young entrepreneur, the youngest female self-made billionaire, to being dubbed by one columnist as a “millennial Bernie Madoff.”
Although the company settled civil fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission in March 2018, federal prosecutors brought the criminal charges against Holmes and Balwani three months later. Each is charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud.
The saga was the subject of a book by Carreyrou and a documentary by Alex Gibney that aired on HBO last month.
Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images
