Elizabeth Holmes turns herself in: How long will she be in prison?

Elizabeth Holmes, the co-founder of tech comapny Theranos, has turned herself in, ending a long fraud case that saw her convicted of scamming some of the world’s richest people.

Holmes seemed to have everything going for her. At the age of 30, she had become “the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire,” according to Forbes, with a net worth of $4.5 billion. Today, she began eleven years in federal prison. Holmes, now 39 and a mother of two, has been mandated by the courts to report to prison on 30 May.

Lawyers representing Holmes had appealed her case to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit with evidence to the court that they believe warrant a re-trial. However, this appeal has already been rejected once by US District Judge Edward Davila. The court has recommended that Holmes serve her sentence in a low-security women’s prison in Bryan, Texas. There are, at any given moment, anywhere between 500 and 700 women held at the facility.

How the legal troubles began for Elizabeth Holmes

Back in 2015, things started to fall apart when journalist John Carreyrou from the Wall Street Journal conducted an investigation into the company. He received a tip from a whistleblower and began to probe in secret. Despite facing threats and strong-arm tactics aimed at suppressing his report, he managed to publish his “bombshell” article. The findings of Carreyrou’s reporting helped to uncover the smoke and mirrors that were being presented at Theranos as the future of diagnostic medicine.

In 2018, she and her business and romantic partner, Ramesh Balwani, were charged by the SEC with fraud. According to financial regulators, the company had fraudulently obtained more than $700 million from investors. In order to settle the matter, Holmes was prohibited from holding any officer or director role in a publicly traded company for a decade.

In that particular year, Holmes and Balwani were indicted by the US District Court for the Northern District of California on various counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Eventually, both of them were declared guilty in the year 2022. While Holmes was held guilty on four out of eleven counts, Balwani was convicted on twelve counts associated with the fraudulent activities.