(Bloomberg) — Elizabeth Holmes took the stand for the fourth day, defending herself on Monday against criminal fraud charges in California.
The government has already spent 10 weeks laying out its case with witnesses who depicted Holmes as deeply deceptive. In her initial testimony, the 37-year-old discussed the youth and idealism required to start Theranos Inc., which collapsed in 2018. She was questioned by her attorney and has yet to be cross-examined by prosecutors.
No Control Over Statements (7:47 p.m. in N.Y.)
Holmes told the jury Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, her former boyfriend and second-in-command at Theranos, didn’t control the statements she made as the company’s chief executive officer, but that she doesn’t fully grasp how much he influenced her.
Her lawyer asked her whether Balwani forced her to make statements to investors, journalists, her board or controlled her actions with business partners Walgreens and Safeway. Holmes said he didn’t, though she later said she wasn’t so sure.
“I don’t know,” Holmes said. “He impacted everything about who I was and I don’t fully understand that.”
Prosecutors allege her false statements amounted to fraud.
Audit of Theranos: (7:02 p.m. in N.Y.)
Holmes testified that when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did an audit of Theranos in 2016, “I had gone into that inspection thinking that we had one of the best labs in the world.”
The audit led to the conclusion by CMS that the Theranos blood tests jeopardized patient health.
Afterwards, Holmes said, she had brought in “as many experts as I could” to fix the problems but that Balwani “didn’t like them.”
Ending Relationship With Balwani: (7 p.m. in N.Y.)
Balwani left Theranos in May 2016, Holmes said. “He wasn’t who I thought he was. I realized that if I was going to fix the issues and see the company see through its potential, I was going to have to do that” without him.
That same month, Holmes said, she moved out of the home she shared with Balwani while he was away in Thailand. When she made him aware that she’d moved out, “He said he was getting on a plane to come back.” Holmes said she’s had no relationship with him since then.
Balwani has also been charged with fraud over the Theranos collapse, but his trial is scheduled for next year. He has pleaded not guilty.
‘I Have Molded You’: (5:39 p.m. in N.Y.)
When Theranos was enjoying more success as a company around 2014 and 2015, Holmes said she described to Balwani a presentation she gave at an event for women in engineering. “I was talking about all these girls comping up to me and saying they were inspired.”
In a text, Balwani told her, “I have molded you.”
‘Force me to have sex’: (5:24 p.m. in N.Y.)
Holmes testified that Balwani “would get very angry with me and sometimes come up to our bedroom and force me to have sex with him when I didn’t want to.”
That persisted throughout the course of their relationship from 2005-2016, she said.
Balwani’s criticism: (5:12 p.m. N.Y.)
Holmes said Balwani, who had started out as her mentor, was often critical of her. “He felt like I came across as a little girl and he thought that I needed to be serious and not so giddy.”
Holmes said she believed that if she lived by Balwani’s tenets, she’d be successful, but while she tried, he was very critical of her.
“He would get very angry with me and would yell at me that he was so disappointed in my mediocrity.”
“He told me that I didn’t know what I was doing in business, that my convictions were wrong.” He told her that she “needed to kill the person I was” to become an entrepreneur.
“He was very prescriptive. He said that if I wanted to be a good entrepreneur, I needed to spend all of my time on the business,” including not sleeping very much and eating “foods that would make me only pure, having a very disciplined and intense lifestyle.”
Rape at Stanford: (5:09 p.m. in N.Y.)
Holmes testified that she’d been raped while she was studying at Stanford University — and that the experience motivated her to concentrate on developing her blood-testing startup.
“I decided to pour myself into building Theranos,” she told the jury Monday in federal court in San Jose, California.
Meeting Balwani (5:08 p.m. N.Y.)
She said she was encouraged to pursue her business aspirations by Balwani, whom she had met while studying language in China the summer before she started at Stanford when she was 18 and he was 38.
“I understood that he’d been a really successful business person” who’d worked with Bill Gates and sold a software company.
After telling Balwani about the rape, he told her “I was safe now that I met him.”
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