"... with her onetime boyfriend Ramesh 'Sunny' Balwani — also the company’s president and chief operating officer, who is scheduled to go on trial separately early next year — and that she will likely take the stand in her defense..... ... Holmes’s lawyers may claim she was the victim of an alleged 'abusive intimate-partner relationship' with Balwani in which he subjected her to psychological, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse for 'over a decade' that, in turn, led to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. According to court filings, Holmes has claimed, among other things, that Balwani controlled what she ate and how she dressed, that he monitored her calls, texts, and emails, and that he threw what are at one point described as 'hard, sharp objects at her.' In addition to providing expert testimony on the subject, Holmes’s lawyers said that she is 'likely to testify herself to the reasons why she believed, relied on, and deferred to Mr. Balwani' in order to demonstrate that 'she lacked the intent to deceive because, as a result of her deference to Mr. Balwani, she believed that various representations were true.... It would... present the government with a difficult strategic decision given the sensitivity of the allegations.... [S]he would only need to convince one person to hang the jury, which would be tantamount to a victory...."
You just need one juror to follow the "believe all women" approach to allegations that the man abused the woman. And if Holmes takes the stand, she'll deploy those powers of hers that bamboozled Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and whatever other experienced, intelligent males fell for her.
By the way, Balwani is 56 years old. Holmes is 37. She was 19 when she founded the company. Balwani came in 6 years later, when she was 25, and he was 44. So what was the gender-based power dynamic? Did he control her and somehow lead her into conning old guys such as Kissinger, or was she weirdly adept at hypnotizing older men?
Watch and you can laugh with hindsight, but look into the future and think about her taking the stand and needing only one juror to buy into the worldview she presents.
I can see one juror falling for that nonsense. Then again, the prosecution gets a do over if there is a hung jury. That gambit is a longshot but that is all she has.
Holmes has claimed, among other things, that Balwani controlled what she ate and how she dressed, that he monitored her calls, texts, and emails, and that he threw what are at one point described as 'hard, sharp objects at her.'
Ordinarily I'd be sympathetic, but things like that can happen when someone is stupid enough to fall for someone who is twice her age and married.
Holmes's father was a bigshot at Enron, the fraudulent energy trading company. That she didn't learn from that doesn't make one very hopeful about humanity's capacity to learn from the past.
It's a good strategy. It might be OJ Simpson dream team good. We'll see...
I never had more than a glancing eye on what she was doing. Since college I've been frustrated with entrepreneurial women. Give credit to the disturbingly small percentage of women who choose to deviate from the safe route of suing your way to the top of someone else's creation, but why does your elevator pitch always have to begin with '____ is a space where women are underserved...' ? Before leaving the starting gate you've eliminated half the population from your business model. At least for a time with Elizabeth Holmes it was 'Hooray!!! At last! A true female pioneer!!!!'...
What a weak and classically feminist defense! She is so phony even her voice was faked. She knew her “product” didn’t work and she kept building it up anyway and duping investors. She fooled a lot of VIPs and they want her punished.
I've seen this behavior before. I'll call it the Oracle at Delphi.
Your speech/act takes you right to the edge of a nervous breakdown, but then you recover, and share your revelations found in your emotional turmoil.
There was a Snohomish county executive named Aaron Reardon. He was a master of this technique. He was finally convicted of having the state pay for his mistress. He was a democrat.
Maybe it's a real life "The Last Seduction," but more likely Ms. Holmes is about to find out first hand that the prisons are full of women with bad taste in men. Illegal is still illegal.
Dont forget that Gen Mattis was given a Board seat on this company as payment for his "service" to the MIC.
Mattis was in charge of Central Command when he pushed for the fraudulent Edison test to be used by the army even after Army health professionals warned against it. Mattis was even informed by the Dept of Defense Ethics division that joining the Theranos board after leaving active duty after having pushed for this BS product while on active duty didn't stand up to scrutiny....Mattis joined anyway.
Because this case involves hearing aabout and understanding at least a tiny bit of Math and Chemistry, I fully expect the "abused woman" defense to work, especially with a jury chosen from the residents of San Francisco. Any city whose residents pay to have a "poop app" to help residents avoid human feces on their street deserves what San Franciscans have, good and hard. And those residents won't be able to tell facts from fictions in this case at all, at all, at all.
In the crime dramas I watch on TV, there is a common pattern. If a man does a bad thing, a man does a bad thing; but if a woman does a bad thing, the writers put in a heart tugging backstory about a man who did bad things to her that made her do the bad thing she did. It’s as if women aren’t capable of being culpable.
It used to be said that, "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Nowadays, the last refuge is some variant (often clever) of "I'm oppressed."
I recall that studies show that single jurors rarely have the fortitude, stubbornness, whatever to hold out against 11. Male majority jury selected here.
She was his boss.
Makes you wonder about corporate standards that elderly icons are allowed to serve on boards. At least these guys are not being not prosecuted like Clark Clifford.
The Holmes trial should be absolutely fascinating. To prepare for it, one might benefit from reading the non-fic best seller, "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou, about the whole Theranos fiasco.
If you want to read about more fun and games in the medical device world, but with a perspective from the target side,, read "Cardiac Arrest" by Howard Root & Stephen Saltarelli, about Root's adventures with the federal government's "investigation" into his medical device company.
Watch and you can laugh with hindsight, but look into the future and think about her taking the stand and needing only one juror to buy into the worldview she presents.
That's only true if the prosecution is willing to throw in the towel after one 11-1 hung jury.
if she can't get 12, or at least 6, to buy her story, she just faces repeated expensive trials until the prosecution can get 12
Only elites and people with too much time on their hands -- the kind that reads NYT -- even know what the hell this is all about or have ever heard of Elizabeth Holmes.
"Did he control her and somehow lead her into conning old guys such as Kissinger, or was she weirdly adept at hypnotizing older men?"
Funny stuff. He made her con old guys, or she managed to "hypnotize" them all by herself. What made them so connable, I wonder?
Anyway, the blithe citation of the Warren BS about medical costs and bankruptcy should have triggered skepticism about her persona all by itself. But then, there's a sucker etc. etc.
By the way, Balwani is 56 years old. Holmes is 37. She was 19 when she founded the company. Balwani came in 6 years later, when she was 25, and he was 44.
My understanding is that their "science" is trash, and was trash from the beginning. If that's not true, then what follows has no point.
But if it is true, then if she goes on the stand she's toast. Because the prosecution will point out that the fraudulent X she was arrested for, started long before Balwani came on board.
Which pretty much blows her defense out of the water. No?
From the moment I first learned about Theranos when it was an early stage company, I said it was a scam. Most people I know who have working knowledge of the field thought the same thing from the beginning.
The fact that the Theranos board of directors was mostly people without knowledge of the field (generals, diplomats, people with scientific/medical backgrounds not relevant to the Theranos product line, etc.) should have been an extremely loud alarm, but..."Look! An attractive, quirky, hyper-confident female CEO who dresses like Steve Jobs! Silicon Valley revolutionizes medicine! A sure thing!" Or a perfect con.
Of course, none of that is relevant to this trial.
It’s as if women aren’t capable of being culpable.
This; is The Story of Our Lives
Women aren't capible of consent Women aren't capible of being culpable Women aren't capible of 'hard' math classes; like Algebra 2, or Geometry Women aren't capible at sports, so they need their own teams Women aren't capible of knowing how much they should eat, or diet, or exercise Women are EQUAL to MEN, in EVERY Way; that's Why they need special dispensation
On the other hand.... Women Do make life worth living; so, there's That
Watch and you can laugh with hindsight, but look into the future and think about her taking the stand and needing only one juror to buy into the worldview she presents.
Is the law professor actually assessing the systemic affects of policy? Interesting.
I'm reminded why I cannot watch TED Talks. My God, such staged fluff.
Anyway- she was not absconded in the dead of night, forced at gunpoint to start up this company, to layout an idea and present it to investors and gladly accept their millions, to seduce older statesmen into giving her some cred at the Big Tables, and to keep lying to investors, investigators, and the public as her one-woman PR campaign clicked into full gear. She was a strong, entrepreneurial woman. The toast of the media. The new face of the new generation.
Except that her entire life had been a lie going into Theranos. Why wouldn't Theranos also be a lie? One wonders about the power of a pretty face and blond hair. (Meade...enter comment here_____)
I should add that this was such a blatant con that it really exposes a lot of the problem with the "best and brightest." The board members clearly did not do appropriate due diligence. It is hard for me to reach any other conclusion than that even if they were given fraudulent information, they were derelict in their fiduciary responsibilities, largely through their own arrogance and ignorance. Now extrapolate that behavior to the matters of state and commerce with which they have been involved.
"Ramesh Bałwani" as Svengali? I'm dubious, but I'd have to look deep into his eyes before rendering any verdict. Henry Kissinger, on the other hand....
I never saw or heard her but somebody on the staff of the Armstrong and Getty radio show could do what must be an excellent imitation. Deep voice and claim about how little blood you need, brought up around all sorts of topics.
As an devotee of books analyzing corporate scandals, I’ve often noted how incredibly asleep at the wheel board members are, despite their fiduciary duties to the companies they serve for. At Enron, they didn’t have the “proud grandpa” complex afflicting Schultz, Nunn, et al, but the same easy breezy feel pervaded accounts of Board proceedings. One hoped in vain that someone would ask one probing question that could have saved the day. At Theranos: “why has the FDA only approved your nanotainers only for one test after these several years?” At Enron: “what is Fastow’s actual compensation from running these special purpose entities?”
Is there some kind of legislative fix for the captivity of board members to management? Maybe for public companies, you have all the attendees of shareholder meetings vote on which other attendee asked the best question, and then that person gets to serve on the board for the next year (with the same pay as the other members!) and be the turd in the punch bowl at what’s otherwise a company-paid schmoozefest.
I can’t help you with juries, though! She’s guilty as can be but dollars to doughnuts she gets away with it.
Oops! I apparently sold Sunny short. Here's the following from that Forbes article Temujin cited above:
"When she was 18 or 19, Balwani (who was 16 years her senior) invited her to Paris. Her parents were appalled. Why is she dating this awful old man? And he is from India! But he took them to Aspen in his jet and paid for their bills at an expensive hotel for a week in Paris and they decided he was OK."
Serious Question A cute, nineteen (nearly 20) year old Blonde girl, who is failing her sophmore year of Chemical Engineering comes on to you, telling you that SHE figured out how to do multiple blood tests; on a SINGLE DROP of blood. Every medical professor she has talked to, has said "It's Not Going To Work; what you say you are doing is impossible" But YOU, are a Chemical Engineering Professor (and her advisor) And YOU decide to be on the Board of her new company. Eventually the Board is filled with Generals Statesmen and other TOP MEN... But NO Med people For TEN YEARS, her company doesn't produce ANYTHING, besides a comfortable living for the Blonde [Did i mention, that her daddy was a Vice President at Enron?]
So my question is: how often did she provide Oral Pleasure to you, in return for your going along? Every day? every week? once a month for the ten years? Every now and then? ... EVER??
This Blonde girl seems to put Kamela Harris to shame, when it cums to working on men If she Actually managed to sway that many old geezers, without regular Oral Pleasure; She truly IS a mastermind
NYC PBS (Channel 13) had the original 1957 version of 12 Angry Men on last Saturday night.
Wikipedia: The film tells the story of a jury of 12 men as they deliberate the conviction or acquittal of an 18-year old defendant on the basis of reasonable doubt, forcing the jurors to question their morals and values. It stars Henry Fonda (who also produced the film with Reginald Rose), Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, E. G. Marshall, and Jack Warden.
The film was selected as the second-best courtroom drama ever (after 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird) by the American Film Institute for their AFI's 10 Top 10 list.
A 4-minute clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jxVnlRdelU
Great acting! Elizabeth Holmes could get some tips by watching it.
Mark said... Only elites and people with too much time on their hands -- the kind that reads NYT -- even know what the hell this is all about or have ever heard of Elizabeth Holmes.
ColoComment said... The Holmes trial should be absolutely fascinating. To prepare for it, one might benefit from reading the non-fic best seller, "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou, about the whole Theranos fiasco.
Carreyrou has started a podcast that covers what's transpired with Holmes since his book initially came out and plans to continue his commentary throughout the trial. He addresses the allegations against Balwani and gives them zero credence.
Mikee, The jury pool is from Santa Clara County. Bad, but not as ridiculous as San Francisco. I read the Bad Blood as soon as it came out. It all took part where I live, which was fun. But what I took away from it, was how utterly ruthless her attorneys were, and how she fooled so many - Henry K, and the oldsters from the Hoover Institution. And her neighbor / MD / inventor, and how he realized she neglected to patent something she needed, so he patented it. Not exactly neighborly. Everything about this story is fascinating. Who got her pregnant, anyway?
"I believe... the individual... is the answer... to the challenges... " Nearly the whole speech. Very odd.
However, I don't think I would not have noticed the phony baritone. I might have let that pass. But now that it's pointed out - well yes there are several points where she's strained to keep it so low and it becomes clear she's forcing it.
My husband and I had never seen video of her until fairly recently. Given how successfully she conned so many people, we assumed she was a smooth operator, someone who seemed totally genuine and could take in anyone.
Just think of the defrauded investors’ dollars that are being recycled into an absolutely top-of-the-line legal defense for this consummate trickster. IIRC Theranos never produced one damn thing. Not one approved product or process. What a waste of time, money, reputation, public trust. Where the HELL was the SEC or the FDA or the State Attorneys-General or the State Health Departments while this con was ongoing for literally years?
"But what I took away from it, was how utterly ruthless her attorneys were . . ."
David Boies is a real piece of work. There to do the bidding of Weinstein, Theranos, and every greasy Democrat whoever needed a dirty deed done (but not dirt cheap), among others
'...she'll deploy those powers of hers that bamboozled Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and whatever other experienced, intelligent males fell for her.'
Don't forget old Mad Dog Mattis...smartest guy in the room...not.
So the short version is women are weak and easily manipulated...just like the idiot men on the board who fell for a blonde with decent tits who would sing bass in the choir...
I wasn't that impressed by her TED talk, but maybe in a more private setting she's more persuasive. She's good looking and women murderers have gotten off based on their good looks. She's only on trial for a white collar crime. Maybe if she can tell how that beloved uncle who died of brain cancer had molested her as a child, she can win over the jury....If she could con all those sagacious tribal elders, maybe she can con the jury. or perhaps the sentence won't be too harsh, and she'll pick up a bundle for her book. Whatever happens, I don't anticipate a tragic ending....She can take pride for shaping one of the biggest frauds in business history and doing it before she was twenty one. Look at all the time and trouble Madoff and Miliken had to go through to kite their schemes. She has talent. Maybe she can guest host for Ellen or Jeopardy.
I suspect at the end of the day it's going to come out that there was no magic persuasive power nor were there any sexual favors involved. It's going to come down to Kissinger, Mattis, Schultz, et. al not knowing anything about them new-fangled computin' machines.
Serious question: Did anyone die or suffer permanent harm from a Theranos misdiagnosis, or non-diagnosis of a genuine medical issue? You'd think there would be quite a few people affected.
"But what I took away from it, was how utterly ruthless her attorneys were . . ."
David Boies is a real piece of work. There to do the bidding of Weinstein, Theranos, and every greasy Democrat whoever needed a dirty deed done (but not dirt cheap), among others
Boies seemed so wonderful when he successfully argued the case to make Gay marriage legal in California.
Blogger Andrew said..."Serious question: Did anyone die or suffer permanent harm from a Theranos misdiagnosis, or non-diagnosis of a genuine medical issue?"
You're a lawyer, right? They lied through their teeth to procure billions of dollars.
I hope nobody was injured, but it seems both unlikely and somewhat irrelevant. If no one was injured, Holmes et al. just got lucky.
>>The film was selected as the second-best courtroom drama ever
It's ridiculous in some ways, glorious in others, but my pick for best courtroom drama might well be Inherit the Wind.
No, wait, wait, it's definitely Witness for the Prosecution (even though my little movie night group was bored to tears)! Can you beat Charles Laughton's cross-examination of Marlene Dietrich: "Were you lying then, are you lying now, or are you not a chronic and habitual LIE-AH?" Plus I love that Marlene's testimony was successfully depicted as a lie that exonerated Tyrone Power, even though the testimony was technically 100 percent true (though misleading). And a great little side performance by Elsa Lanchester. Only dis is that Power's performance was a bit weak.
There was a (TV?) remake with Diana Ring playing the Dietrich role, Ralph Richardson(?) for Charles Laughton, and, I think, Jeff Bridges for Tyrone Power. Only seen that one once or twice.
She's a very pretty woman in photos, but I don't see much charm in evidence in the video clip, and as the MAD TV character might say, "She sounda like a man." She doesn't seem to have much in the way of seductive feminine wiles.
Maybe it's geek chic, and people assumed that the odder people in the tech world are, the more likely it is that they're geniuses.
Besides being the daughter of an Enron VP, she is also a descendant of the Fleischmann family, who gave us The New Yorker.
Andrew @7:38: “ Serious question: Did anyone die or suffer permanent harm from a Theranos misdiagnosis, or non-diagnosis of a genuine medical issue? You'd think there would be quite a few people affected.”
I had thought of asking that question and I’m glad you did. It might be hard to find the people who (unknowingly?) relied on the Theranos stuff to inform their diagnosis and drive their care plan. Maybe Theranos’ stuff was never used in a live-fire exercise…but IIRC IT WAS, there would have been hellacious pressure to get something to market, all validated (using cooked data?), to keep that stock price up in the stratosphere.
You know, if somebody sells me a gold mine that has cooked numbers and yields less or nothing, I might almost forgive him as a clever rogue. But when he sells me a company whose tests will supposedly detect life-threatening conditions and in fact they do nothing of the sort? And he knew it? He’s a murderer or near enough. Unforgivable.
Elizabeth Holmes' Dad was a VP at Enron. I find that an interesting factoid although I don't believe he was implicated in any wrong-doing there. She's represented by Kevin Downey of Williams & Connolly, which can't be cheap and I wonder who's paying the freight for that. Maybe it's her D&O insurance.
Downey went to Dartmouth and Harvard. Robert Leach, the lead prosecutor in the case, went to Yale and UCLA. And the judge Edward Davila who was born in Palo Alto, was appointed to the federal bench by Barack Obama. He went to San Diego State and Hastings.
Another defense that she's apparently going to try and roll out is that hype and exaggeration are common with startups, especially in Silicon Valley and that is all she was doing, puffery but not intentional deceit. I think that defense might be difficult to reconcile, however, with the abuse defense.
Another recommendation for Carreyrou's book. Very breezy, but rich in detail. While Mattis clearly earned the scorn he's getting on this page, I think George Schultz comes out worse. He hosted the ambush of his grandson, Theranos employee and leaker of info to Carreyrou, in his home by Boies' deputies to get the grandson to admit to leaking the info and cease and desist. Deeply shameful that he choose the side of Holmes and the gaggle of sycophants over his own blood. He and his whole family have to live with that betrayal.
A shorter alternative to the book and podcasts is “The Inventor”, a documentary on HBO Max (though, interestingly enough, I couldn’t find it via searching directly on HBO Max — I had to search for it on Apple TV, which then took me over to HBO Max).
I spent many years covering Silicon Valley for BYTE and Macworld, and I did a venture-funded software startup as well. I’m not surprised by people like Elizabeth Holmes or Adam Newmann (go watch the Hulu documentary on WeWork); the messianic mindset often actually leads to success in the tech industry. What does surprise me are the hordes of employees who buy into their founder’s cult even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary, as you see in both “The Inventor” and in the WeWork documentary.
I will also note — as someone who had quite a few direct interactions with Steve Jobs from 1988 to 1994 — that Holmes and Newmann are not like Jobs, as much ask they wanted to be. The dual experiences of being fired from Apple and having NeXT fail in the marketplace (until Apple bought it for $400M) gave Jobs a a very hard-nosed, reality-based view of the tech market — which is why he was so enormously successful in his second go-round at Apple, and why I’m typing this on an nth-generation iPad (his last major product line) a full decade after his death.
OK, bought the Kindle edition of Bad Blood and just finished reading it. (No, really - I read fast, and it’s a fast read.)
Holy crap. The whole thing was far, far worse than even the documentary presented. For me, the key passage of the book is where the author explains that Fed free money (zero interest rates) in the wake of the subprime crisis and subsequent recession left investors looking for places to put their money, and Theranos looked like a dream come true. No one bothered to do their due diligence. Things that are too good to be true usually aren’t.
My professional specialty over the past 25 years has been why large projects fail; for five years, I’ve taught a senior-level computer science course (CS 428 at BYU) on ‘real-world software engineering’ that covers many of those factors in detail. And while the Theranos debacle was more about biotech than software, all the classic red flags are there, almost from the very beginning.
Holmes has claimed, among other things, that Balwani controlled what she ate and how she dressed, that he monitored her calls, texts, and emails, and that he threw what are at one point described as 'hard, sharp objects at her.'
I know if that happened to me, first thing I'd want to do is go fleece some investors.
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73 comments:
MEN!!!
I can see one juror falling for that nonsense. Then again, the prosecution gets a do over if there is a hung jury. That gambit is a longshot but that is all she has.
Holmes has claimed, among other things, that Balwani controlled what she ate and how she dressed, that he monitored her calls, texts, and emails, and that he threw what are at one point described as 'hard, sharp objects at her.'
Ordinarily I'd be sympathetic, but things like that can happen when someone is stupid enough to fall for someone who is twice her age and married.
Holmes's father was a bigshot at Enron, the fraudulent energy trading company. That she didn't learn from that doesn't make one very hopeful about humanity's capacity to learn from the past.
It's a good strategy. It might be OJ Simpson dream team good. We'll see...
I never had more than a glancing eye on what she was doing. Since college I've been frustrated with entrepreneurial women. Give credit to the disturbingly small percentage of women who choose to deviate from the safe route of suing your way to the top of someone else's creation, but why does your elevator pitch always have to begin with '____ is a space where women are underserved...' ? Before leaving the starting gate you've eliminated half the population from your business model. At least for a time with Elizabeth Holmes it was 'Hooray!!! At last! A true female pioneer!!!!'...
I suppose she's still a female pioneer....
What a weak and classically feminist defense! She is so phony even her voice was faked. She knew her “product” didn’t work and she kept building it up anyway and duping investors. She fooled a lot of VIPs and they want her punished.
She would need to convince one juror who the other jurors are unable to unconvince.
It's the Twinkie Defense 2.0!
I've seen this behavior before. I'll call it the Oracle at Delphi.
Your speech/act takes you right to the edge of a nervous breakdown, but then you recover, and share your revelations found in your emotional turmoil.
There was a Snohomish county executive named Aaron Reardon. He was a master of this technique. He was finally convicted of having the state pay for his mistress. He was a democrat.
Maybe it's a real life "The Last Seduction," but more likely Ms. Holmes is about to find out first hand that the prisons are full of women with bad taste in men. Illegal is still illegal.
Dont forget that Gen Mattis was given a Board seat on this company as payment for his "service" to the MIC.
Mattis was in charge of Central Command when he pushed for the fraudulent Edison test to be used by the army even after Army health professionals warned against it. Mattis was even informed by the Dept of Defense Ethics division that joining the Theranos board after leaving active duty after having pushed for this BS product while on active duty didn't stand up to scrutiny....Mattis joined anyway.
Because this case involves hearing aabout and understanding at least a tiny bit of Math and Chemistry, I fully expect the "abused woman" defense to work, especially with a jury chosen from the residents of San Francisco. Any city whose residents pay to have a "poop app" to help residents avoid human feces on their street deserves what San Franciscans have, good and hard. And those residents won't be able to tell facts from fictions in this case at all, at all, at all.
In the crime dramas I watch on TV, there is a common pattern. If a man does a bad thing, a man does a bad thing; but if a woman does a bad thing, the writers put in a heart tugging backstory about a man who did bad things to her that made her do the bad thing she did. It’s as if women aren’t capable of being culpable.
Given she is a demonstrated liar and conwoman, this seems just more of a con.
She conned The Best and The Brightest.
A victimless crime.
She should be the Director of National Intelligence.
It used to be said that, "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Nowadays, the last refuge is some variant (often clever) of "I'm oppressed."
Surely possible to Name some one who walked away from the pitch/ representations and was not bamboozled!!
Scary to think these guys were leading members of USA administration
I recall that studies show that single jurors rarely have the fortitude, stubbornness, whatever to hold out against 11. Male majority jury selected here.
She was his boss.
Makes you wonder about corporate standards that elderly icons are allowed to serve on boards. At least these guys are not being not prosecuted like Clark Clifford.
The Holmes trial should be absolutely fascinating. To prepare for it, one might benefit from reading the non-fic best seller, "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou, about the whole Theranos fiasco.
If you want to read about more fun and games in the medical device world, but with a perspective from the target side,, read "Cardiac Arrest" by Howard Root & Stephen Saltarelli, about Root's adventures with the federal government's "investigation" into his medical device company.
Page-turners, both of them.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33296868-cardiac-arrest
Watch and you can laugh with hindsight, but look into the future and think about her taking the stand and needing only one juror to buy into the worldview she presents.
That's only true if the prosecution is willing to throw in the towel after one 11-1 hung jury.
if she can't get 12, or at least 6, to buy her story, she just faces repeated expensive trials until the prosecution can get 12
Only elites and people with too much time on their hands -- the kind that reads NYT -- even know what the hell this is all about or have ever heard of Elizabeth Holmes.
"Did he control her and somehow lead her into conning old guys such as Kissinger, or was she weirdly adept at hypnotizing older men?"
Funny stuff. He made her con old guys, or she managed to "hypnotize" them all by herself. What made them so connable, I wonder?
Anyway, the blithe citation of the Warren BS about medical costs and bankruptcy should have triggered skepticism about her persona all by itself. But then, there's a sucker etc. etc.
By the way, Balwani is 56 years old. Holmes is 37. She was 19 when she founded the company. Balwani came in 6 years later, when she was 25, and he was 44.
My understanding is that their "science" is trash, and was trash from the beginning. If that's not true, then what follows has no point.
But if it is true, then if she goes on the stand she's toast. Because the prosecution will point out that the fraudulent X she was arrested for, started long before Balwani came on board.
Which pretty much blows her defense out of the water. No?
From the moment I first learned about Theranos when it was an early stage company, I said it was a scam. Most people I know who have working knowledge of the field thought the same thing from the beginning.
The fact that the Theranos board of directors was mostly people without knowledge of the field (generals, diplomats, people with scientific/medical backgrounds not relevant to the Theranos product line, etc.) should have been an extremely loud alarm, but..."Look! An attractive, quirky, hyper-confident female CEO who dresses like Steve Jobs! Silicon Valley revolutionizes medicine! A sure thing!" Or a perfect con.
Of course, none of that is relevant to this trial.
It’s as if women aren’t capable of being culpable.
This; is The Story of Our Lives
Women aren't capible of consent
Women aren't capible of being culpable
Women aren't capible of 'hard' math classes; like Algebra 2, or Geometry
Women aren't capible at sports, so they need their own teams
Women aren't capible of knowing how much they should eat, or diet, or exercise
Women are EQUAL to MEN, in EVERY Way; that's Why they need special dispensation
On the other hand.... Women Do make life worth living; so, there's That
Watch and you can laugh with hindsight, but look into the future and think about her taking the stand and needing only one juror to buy into the worldview she presents.
Is the law professor actually assessing the systemic affects of policy? Interesting.
In this future she presents there is blood.
Or Asphyxiation.
I'm reminded why I cannot watch TED Talks. My God, such staged fluff.
Anyway- she was not absconded in the dead of night, forced at gunpoint to start up this company, to layout an idea and present it to investors and gladly accept their millions, to seduce older statesmen into giving her some cred at the Big Tables, and to keep lying to investors, investigators, and the public as her one-woman PR campaign clicked into full gear. She was a strong, entrepreneurial woman. The toast of the media. The new face of the new generation.
Except that her entire life had been a lie going into Theranos. Why wouldn't Theranos also be a lie? One wonders about the power of a pretty face and blond hair. (Meade...enter comment here_____)
Elizabeth Holmes and her family
All that said, one juror can apparently knot this up. That is very doable.
I should add that this was such a blatant con that it really exposes a lot of the problem with the "best and brightest." The board members clearly did not do appropriate due diligence. It is hard for me to reach any other conclusion than that even if they were given fraudulent information, they were derelict in their fiduciary responsibilities, largely through their own arrogance and ignorance. Now extrapolate that behavior to the matters of state and commerce with which they have been involved.
Feet of clay, everywhere one looks.
"Ramesh Bałwani" as Svengali? I'm dubious, but I'd have to look deep into his eyes before rendering any verdict. Henry Kissinger, on the other hand....
I never saw or heard her but somebody on the staff of the Armstrong and Getty radio show could do what must be an excellent imitation. Deep voice and claim about how little blood you need, brought up around all sorts of topics.
"that, in turn, led to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety"
"As a result of which I was forced to steal millions of dollars"
Should fly with a jury, right?
"Women aren't capible of consent"
And men can't spell--?
As an devotee of books analyzing corporate scandals, I’ve often noted how incredibly asleep at the wheel board members are, despite their fiduciary duties to the companies they serve for. At Enron, they didn’t have the “proud grandpa” complex afflicting Schultz, Nunn, et al, but the same easy breezy feel pervaded accounts of Board proceedings. One hoped in vain that someone would ask one probing question that could have saved the day. At Theranos: “why has the FDA only approved your nanotainers only for one test after these several years?” At Enron: “what is Fastow’s actual compensation from running these special purpose entities?”
Is there some kind of legislative fix for the captivity of board members to management? Maybe for public companies, you have all the attendees of shareholder meetings vote on which other attendee asked the best question, and then that person gets to serve on the board for the next year (with the same pay as the other members!) and be the turd in the punch bowl at what’s otherwise a company-paid schmoozefest.
I can’t help you with juries, though! She’s guilty as can be but dollars to doughnuts she gets away with it.
Her new romantic partner is 10 years younger than she is.
She just had a baby.
Sounds like her life is going better nowadays.
Is that chelsea Manning?
Oops! I apparently sold Sunny short. Here's the following from that Forbes article Temujin cited above:
"When she was 18 or 19, Balwani (who was 16 years her senior) invited her to Paris. Her parents were appalled. Why is she dating this awful old man? And he is from India! But he took them to Aspen in his jet and paid for their bills at an expensive hotel for a week in Paris and they decided he was OK."
I want her to testify just to find out what voice she uses. I bet she pulls a Blasey Ford.
Serious Question
A cute, nineteen (nearly 20) year old Blonde girl, who is failing her sophmore year of Chemical Engineering comes on to you, telling you that SHE figured out how to do multiple blood tests; on a SINGLE DROP of blood. Every medical professor she has talked to, has said
"It's Not Going To Work; what you say you are doing is impossible"
But YOU, are a Chemical Engineering Professor (and her advisor)
And YOU decide to be on the Board of her new company.
Eventually the Board is filled with Generals Statesmen and other TOP MEN... But NO Med people
For TEN YEARS, her company doesn't produce ANYTHING, besides a comfortable living for the Blonde
[Did i mention, that her daddy was a Vice President at Enron?]
So my question is: how often did she provide Oral Pleasure to you, in return for your going along?
Every day? every week? once a month for the ten years? Every now and then? ... EVER??
This Blonde girl seems to put Kamela Harris to shame, when it cums to working on men
If she Actually managed to sway that many old geezers, without regular Oral Pleasure;
She truly IS a mastermind
NYC PBS (Channel 13) had the original 1957 version of 12 Angry Men on last Saturday night.
Wikipedia: The film tells the story of a jury of 12 men as they deliberate the conviction or acquittal of an 18-year old defendant on the basis of reasonable doubt, forcing the jurors to question their morals and values. It stars Henry Fonda (who also produced the film with Reginald Rose), Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, E. G. Marshall, and Jack Warden.
The film was selected as the second-best courtroom drama ever (after 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird) by the American Film Institute for their AFI's 10 Top 10 list.
A 4-minute clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jxVnlRdelU
Great acting! Elizabeth Holmes could get some tips by watching it.
There Will Be Tears.
"Don't say 'hostage' until you know it's a hostage situation.”
Mark said...
Only elites and people with too much time on their hands -- the kind that reads NYT -- even know what the hell this is all about or have ever heard of Elizabeth Holmes.
9/7/21, 12:05 PM
Actually it was the WSJ that broke the story
ColoComment said...
The Holmes trial should be absolutely fascinating. To prepare for it, one might benefit from reading the non-fic best seller, "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou, about the whole Theranos fiasco.
Carreyrou has started a podcast that covers what's transpired with Holmes since his book initially came out and plans to continue his commentary throughout the trial. He addresses the allegations against Balwani and gives them zero credence.
His podcast is here or here.
Mikee, The jury pool is from Santa Clara County. Bad, but not as ridiculous as San Francisco. I read the Bad Blood as soon as it came out. It all took part where I live, which was fun. But what I took away from it, was how utterly ruthless her attorneys were, and how she fooled so many - Henry K, and the oldsters from the Hoover Institution. And her neighbor / MD / inventor, and how he realized she neglected to patent something she needed, so he patented it. Not exactly neighborly. Everything about this story is fascinating. Who got her pregnant, anyway?
She has an extremely annoying speaking cadence.
"I believe... the individual... is the answer... to the challenges... " Nearly the whole speech. Very odd.
However, I don't think I would not have noticed the phony baritone.
I might have let that pass.
But now that it's pointed out - well yes there are several points where she's strained to keep it so low and it becomes clear she's forcing it.
Original Mike said...
I want her to testify just to find out what voice she uses. I bet she pulls a Blasey Ford.
Mike Yancey said...
there are several points where she's strained to keep it so low and it becomes clear she's forcing it
i Assume, that she's got a little bitty lil' girl voice, that she saves for when she's talking to her elderly investers
ps. wild chicken; my spellchecker won't spellcheck on this browser (MS edge); and it irks me too!
If she Actually managed to sway that many old geezers, without regular Oral Pleasure;
She truly IS a mastermind.
At least Willy Brown had something to show for it, Mattis...
Okay, Okay! I get it. Maybe Brown had nothing to show but genital warts.
My husband and I had never seen video of her until fairly recently. Given how successfully she conned so many people, we assumed she was a smooth operator, someone who seemed totally genuine and could take in anyone.
When we did see video, imagine our surprise!
Oh, Beauty, what can't you accomplish?
Why just men? Holmes hosted a fundraiser with her gal pal Hillary in 2016.
The defense will have a killer closing argument to the jury. It will be built upon the premise that "If the love don't fit, you must acquit!"
Just think of the defrauded investors’ dollars that are being recycled into an absolutely top-of-the-line legal defense for this consummate trickster. IIRC Theranos never produced one damn thing. Not one approved product or process. What a waste of time, money, reputation, public trust. Where the HELL was the SEC or the FDA or the State Attorneys-General or the State Health Departments while this con was ongoing for literally years?
Stone the Witch
Retail Esq said:
"But what I took away from it, was how utterly ruthless her attorneys were . . ."
David Boies is a real piece of work. There to do the bidding of Weinstein, Theranos, and every greasy Democrat whoever needed a dirty deed done (but not dirt cheap), among others
'...she'll deploy those powers of hers that bamboozled Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and whatever other experienced, intelligent males fell for her.'
Don't forget old Mad Dog Mattis...smartest guy in the room...not.
So the short version is women are weak and easily manipulated...just like the idiot men on the board who fell for a blonde with decent tits who would sing bass in the choir...
So what, was someone starting to think again that maybe trial lawyers had some sense of shame or somethin'?
I wasn't that impressed by her TED talk, but maybe in a more private setting she's more persuasive. She's good looking and women murderers have gotten off based on their good looks. She's only on trial for a white collar crime. Maybe if she can tell how that beloved uncle who died of brain cancer had molested her as a child, she can win over the jury....If she could con all those sagacious tribal elders, maybe she can con the jury. or perhaps the sentence won't be too harsh, and she'll pick up a bundle for her book. Whatever happens, I don't anticipate a tragic ending....She can take pride for shaping one of the biggest frauds in business history and doing it before she was twenty one. Look at all the time and trouble Madoff and Miliken had to go through to kite their schemes. She has talent. Maybe she can guest host for Ellen or Jeopardy.
I suspect at the end of the day it's going to come out that there was no magic persuasive power nor were there any sexual favors involved. It's going to come down to Kissinger, Mattis, Schultz, et. al not knowing anything about them new-fangled computin' machines.
So how come board of directors are not codefendants?
Their diligence was non existent!!
Men getting a pass while woman is persecuted / prosecuted
Did Miliken defraud anybody at all?
Serious question: Did anyone die or suffer permanent harm from a Theranos misdiagnosis, or non-diagnosis of a genuine medical issue? You'd think there would be quite a few people affected.
Temujin said...
“One wonders about the power of a pretty face and blond hair. (Meade...enter comment here_____) “
HALp! I’m bEiNG heLD HOsTA!!!
"But what I took away from it, was how utterly ruthless her attorneys were . . ."
David Boies is a real piece of work. There to do the bidding of Weinstein, Theranos, and every greasy Democrat whoever needed a dirty deed done (but not dirt cheap), among others
Boies seemed so wonderful when he successfully argued the case to make Gay marriage legal in California.
Blogger Andrew said..."Serious question: Did anyone die or suffer permanent harm from a Theranos misdiagnosis, or non-diagnosis of a genuine medical issue?"
You're a lawyer, right? They lied through their teeth to procure billions of dollars.
I hope nobody was injured, but it seems both unlikely and somewhat irrelevant. If no one was injured, Holmes et al. just got lucky.
>>The film was selected as the second-best courtroom drama ever
It's ridiculous in some ways, glorious in others, but my pick for best courtroom drama might well be Inherit the Wind.
No, wait, wait, it's definitely Witness for the Prosecution (even though my little movie night group was bored to tears)! Can you beat Charles Laughton's cross-examination of Marlene Dietrich: "Were you lying then, are you lying now, or are you not a chronic and habitual LIE-AH?" Plus I love that Marlene's testimony was successfully depicted as a lie that exonerated Tyrone Power, even though the testimony was technically 100 percent true (though misleading). And a great little side performance by Elsa Lanchester. Only dis is that Power's performance was a bit weak.
There was a (TV?) remake with Diana Ring playing the Dietrich role, Ralph Richardson(?) for Charles Laughton, and, I think, Jeff Bridges for Tyrone Power. Only seen that one once or twice.
--gpm
North recommended Carreyrous podcast.
I just listened to the first episode and am liking it a lot. I'd enjoyed Carreyrous book and he does a great job narrating.
If only they would ditch the announcer with the terminal vocal fry. It's so bad in thinking of passing to get the ad free version.
Thanks North for the recommendation.
John Henry
She's a very pretty woman in photos, but I don't see much charm in evidence in the video clip, and as the MAD TV character might say, "She sounda like a man." She doesn't seem to have much in the way of seductive feminine wiles.
Maybe it's geek chic, and people assumed that the odder people in the tech world are, the more likely it is that they're geniuses.
Besides being the daughter of an Enron VP, she is also a descendant of the Fleischmann family, who gave us The New Yorker.
Andrew @7:38: “ Serious question: Did anyone die or suffer permanent harm from a Theranos misdiagnosis, or non-diagnosis of a genuine medical issue? You'd think there would be quite a few people affected.”
I had thought of asking that question and I’m glad you did. It might be hard to find the people who (unknowingly?) relied on the Theranos stuff to inform their diagnosis and drive their care plan. Maybe Theranos’ stuff was never used in a live-fire exercise…but IIRC IT WAS, there would have been hellacious pressure to get something to market, all validated (using cooked data?), to keep that stock price up in the stratosphere.
You know, if somebody sells me a gold mine that has cooked numbers and yields less or nothing, I might almost forgive him as a clever rogue. But when he sells me a company whose tests will supposedly detect life-threatening conditions and in fact they do nothing of the sort? And he knew it? He’s a murderer or near enough. Unforgivable.
Elizabeth Holmes' Dad was a VP at Enron. I find that an interesting factoid although I don't believe he was implicated in any wrong-doing there. She's represented by Kevin Downey of Williams & Connolly, which can't be cheap and I wonder who's paying the freight for that. Maybe it's her D&O insurance.
Downey went to Dartmouth and Harvard. Robert Leach, the lead prosecutor in the case, went to Yale and UCLA. And the judge Edward Davila who was born in Palo Alto, was appointed to the federal bench by Barack Obama. He went to San Diego State and Hastings.
Another defense that she's apparently going to try and roll out is that hype and exaggeration are common with startups, especially in Silicon Valley and that is all she was doing, puffery but not intentional deceit. I think that defense might be difficult to reconcile, however, with the abuse defense.
Another recommendation for Carreyrou's book. Very breezy, but rich in detail. While Mattis clearly earned the scorn he's getting on this page, I think George Schultz comes out worse. He hosted the ambush of his grandson, Theranos employee and leaker of info to Carreyrou, in his home by Boies' deputies to get the grandson to admit to leaking the info and cease and desist. Deeply shameful that he choose the side of Holmes and the gaggle of sycophants over his own blood. He and his whole family have to live with that betrayal.
A shorter alternative to the book and podcasts is “The Inventor”, a documentary on HBO Max (though, interestingly enough, I couldn’t find it via searching directly on HBO Max — I had to search for it on Apple TV, which then took me over to HBO Max).
I spent many years covering Silicon Valley for BYTE and Macworld, and I did a venture-funded software startup as well. I’m not surprised by people like Elizabeth Holmes or Adam Newmann (go watch the Hulu documentary on WeWork); the messianic mindset often actually leads to success in the tech industry. What does surprise me are the hordes of employees who buy into their founder’s cult even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary, as you see in both “The Inventor” and in the WeWork documentary.
I will also note — as someone who had quite a few direct interactions with Steve Jobs from 1988 to 1994 — that Holmes and Newmann are not like Jobs, as much ask they wanted to be. The dual experiences of being fired from Apple and having NeXT fail in the marketplace (until Apple bought it for $400M) gave Jobs a a very hard-nosed, reality-based view of the tech market — which is why he was so enormously successful in his second go-round at Apple, and why I’m typing this on an nth-generation iPad (his last major product line) a full decade after his death.
#GirlBoss indeed!
OK, bought the Kindle edition of Bad Blood and just finished reading it. (No, really - I read fast, and it’s a fast read.)
Holy crap. The whole thing was far, far worse than even the documentary presented. For me, the key passage of the book is where the author explains that Fed free money (zero interest rates) in the wake of the subprime crisis and subsequent recession left investors looking for places to put their money, and Theranos looked like a dream come true. No one bothered to do their due diligence. Things that are too good to be true usually aren’t.
My professional specialty over the past 25 years has been why large projects fail; for five years, I’ve taught a senior-level computer science course (CS 428 at BYU) on ‘real-world software engineering’ that covers many of those factors in detail. And while the Theranos debacle was more about biotech than software, all the classic red flags are there, almost from the very beginning.
Holmes has claimed, among other things, that Balwani controlled what she ate and how she dressed, that he monitored her calls, texts, and emails, and that he threw what are at one point described as 'hard, sharp objects at her.'
I know if that happened to me, first thing I'd want to do is go fleece some investors.
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