Elizabeth Holmes is still living the high life, prosecutors claimed in a court filing on Thursday, per Insider.
Justin Sullivan / Staff
The founder of Theranos, who was sentenced to 11.25 years in prison in November, is living on an estate where the upkeep costs $13,000 a month, prosecutors wrote. They cited documents provided by Holmes to the probation office.
This filing was in response to efforts by her legal team to keep Holmes out of prison while she appeals her case, per Bloomberg. She is currently scheduled to report to prison in April, which she should still do, prosecutors argued.
“There are not two systems of justice — one for the wealthy and one for the poor — there is one criminal justice system in this country,” they wrote in the filing.
They also said that Holmes “continues to show no remorse to her victims,” in the filing in California’s Northern District Court, where Holmes was tried for fraud.
Holmes started Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford University, inspired to create a better way to draw and test blood due to her anxiety over needles.
Related: What Happened to Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes? Everything from Her Net Worth to Where She Is Now
She later bedazzled investors with claims that her Edison machine could perform over 200 tests with one drop of blood, and then raked in the funding, including $700 million from people including Larry Ellison.
The company was valued at some $10 billion at its peak.
However, the FDA began investigating her company in 2015, and the Wall Street Journal reported the same year that the company’s blood tests were struggling to live up to its public image.
By 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission had charged Holmes and COO Sunny Sunny Balwani with fraud. Holmes’ trial, which was delayed because of her first child’s birth, began in September 2021, and she was found guilty in January 2022.
The court later handed down a sentence of 11.25 years (she had asked for 18 months of home confinement). During the trial, she said: “I regret my failings with every cell of my body.”
While awaiting legal proceedings, she married hotel heir William “Billy” Evans in 2019 and appeared to be pregnant with her second child at trial.
CNBC reported in September 2021 that Holmes was living with Evans at a smaller home on a 74-acre estate in California, then for sale for $135 million.
Prosecutors also said Holmes had told probation officers she still wanted to work on patents related to blood testing, per Bloomberg.
