SAN FRANCISCO, United States — Convicted Theranos founder
Elizabeth Holmes on
Monday asked for a new trial, saying a star prosecution witness showed up at
her home saying he felt he had “done something wrong”.
اضافة اعلان
Holmes is
scheduled to be sentenced in October after a jury early this year found her
guilty of defrauding investors in her blood-testing startup Theranos.
Holmes is a rare
example of a tech exec being brought to book over a company flaming out, in a
sector littered with the carcasses of money-losing businesses that once
promised untold riches.
Her case shone a
spotlight on the blurred line between the hustle that characterizes the
industry and outright criminal dishonesty.
But attorneys
for Holmes said that former Theranos lab manager Adam Rosendorff, who was part
of the prosecution’s case, arrived unannounced at her California home in August
looking disheveled and saying he needed to speak with her.
“He said he
feels guilty, it seemed like he was hurting,” Holmes’s partner William Evans
said of Rosendorff in an exhibit with the court.
“He said when he
was called as a witness he tried to answer the questions honestly but that the
prosecutors tried to make everybody look bad (in the company).”
Evans said he
turned Rosendorff away from the home he shares with Holmes and their young son,
telling Rosendorff that Holmes could not speak with him.
“He said he
thought it would be healing for both himself and Elizabeth to talk,” said
Evans.”
Different verdict?
Evans recounted Rosendorff saying that both he and Holmes were just
starting out in their careers when they worked together at Theranos, and that
“everyone was working so hard to do something good and meaningful.”
Holmes had vowed
to revolutionize health diagnostics with self-service machines that could run
an array of tests on just a few drops of blood, a vision that drew high-profile
backers and made her a billionaire on paper by the age of 30.
She was hailed as
the next tech visionary on magazine covers and collected mountains of
investors’ cash, but it all collapsed after
Wall Street Journal reporting
revealed the machines did not work as promised.
Jurors found her
guilty of four counts of tricking investors.
But the jury also
acquitted her on four charges and could not reach a verdict on three others.
The 38-year-old
now faces the possibility of decades behind bars.
Attorneys for
Holmes argued that Rosendorff was a star witness for prosecutors, and that his
statements put the guilty verdict in doubt.
“If the jury had
heard from Dr Rosendorff that the government cherry-picked evidence to make
things seem worse than they were and that everyone was doing their best and
working hard to do something good and meaningful, the jury would have viewed
this case very differently,” Holmes attorney Amy Mason Saharia argued in the
filing.
Holmes is asking
for a new trial, or at least a hearing in federal court in Silicon Valley to
dig deeper into what Rosendorff meant to tell her at her home, attorneys said.
“He said he wants to help
her,” Evans said of Rosendorff.
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