SAN JOSE, Calif. — Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ seven days on the witness stand in her criminal fraud trial ended Wednesday, with her 10-lawyer defense team resting its case.
The move by Holmes’ lawyers means the jury will not hear from Dr. Mindy Mechanic, a psychologist specializing in relationship violence who has analyzed Holmes, and whom the defense team had suggested they might call to the stand. In stunning testimony, Holmes claimed that Sunny Balwani, her former lover and Theranos’ chief operating officer, had sexually abused her and controlled her in life and work. Mechanic, according to the court filing, would have testified on matters concerning Holmes and the issue of guilt.
Holmes, who founded the now-defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup at age 19 in 2003, is charged with 11 counts of felony fraud. She is accused of allegedly bilking investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars, and defrauding patients with false claims that the company’s machines could conduct a full range of tests using just a few drops of blood.
She and her co-accused, Balwani, have denied the allegations. Balwani is to be tried next year. A lawyer for Balwani declined to comment on Holmes’ allegations against him.
Before she stepped down from the stand Wednesday, Holmes again pointed her finger at Balwani, bolstering her previous claims that he led many operations at Theranos. Her lawyer Kevin Downey showed the jury text messages between Holmes and Balwani that she testified represented him taking over aspects of the business from her, such as running the chemistry team in the lab. Asked by Downey who her most important adviser was at Theranos — whose board included former U.S. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz — Holmes named Balwani.
She concluded her time on the stand by flatly denying the main allegations against her. Asked by Downey whether Theranos investors had lost their money because she misled them, she said, “Of course not.” To the question, “Did you at any time try to lead patients to believe Theranos could offer accurate and reliable services when you knew it could not?” her response was the same.
The resting of the defense case indicates her lawyers concluded they have done enough to raise reasonable doubt among jurors about whether Holmes committed fraud, said Bay Area legal analyst and former prosecutor Michele Hagan.
“There’s either not enough evidence of abusive conduct,” Hagan said of the decision to keep Mechanic off the stand, “or they’ve decided that they just don’t want to make it an issue.”
Holmes’ defense could argue in their closing statement that she was doing what Balwani, who was also the company president, told her to do, Hagan said.
For the jury, the suggestion that Balwani, not Holmes, was responsible for problems and potentially crimes at Theranos will remain confined to Holmes’ testimony. That allows Holmes to “play the sympathy card” with jurors while preventing the prosecution’s expert witness, a psychiatrist who also evaluated Holmes, from offering testimony diminishing the argument that Holmes was not responsible for fraud, Hagan said.
The jury heard from 29 prosecution witnesses who mostly corroborated each others’ testimony that claims about Theranos’ technology put out to investors and the public by Holmes and the company went beyond the capabilities of the technology. Holmes, at the end of her testimony Wednesday, suggested that her statements had been forward looking. “I talked about what we created and what it could do, what was possible,” she testified.
Judge Edward Davila scheduled closing arguments to start Dec. 16, and said the jury will begin deliberating on Dec. 17 or Dec. 20, depending on how long closing arguments take.
Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted, plus fines and possible restitution.
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