Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’s criminal trial is almost certainly headed for another delay after her lawyers and prosecutors revealed in a Friday court filing that she is pregnant and due to give birth in July.
Ms. Holmes had been slated to begin trial July 13, a date that is no longer feasible, lawyers said in the filing in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif. In light of her pregnancy, the two sides asked a federal judge on Friday to move the beginning of jury selection to Aug. 31.
Ms. Holmes is accused of defrauding investors and patients about Theranos’s technology, which purported to use just a few drops of blood from a finger prick to test for a variety of health conditions. Prosecutors brought charges against her and the company’s former chief operating officer, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, in June 2018. Ms. Holmes has been scheduled to go on trial first, with the date repeatedly being delayed because of the pandemic.
Both former executives have pleaded not guilty.
Attorneys for Ms. Holmes didn’t respond to a request for comment Friday. According to the court filing, her lawyers told the government about the pregnancy March 2.
The now-defunct blood testing company came under public pressure in late 2015, after The Wall Street Journal revealed that the company ran few tests on its proprietary machines, which produced unreliable results, and instead performed most tests with commercial analyzers that it bought from other companies and sometimes altered.
Ms. Holmes has sparred with the government over what jurors can see at trial, including whether prosecutors can call as witnesses former patients who say they received inaccurate test results from Theranos, and whether they can show regulator reports finding issues with Theranos labs.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila is scheduled to hear arguments in May on such requests seeking to shape how the trial will look. Prosecutors and Ms. Holmes’s attorneys said in the Friday filing that they aren’t asking to delay that hearing or others already set in the run-up to the trial.
Ms. Holmes, once a darling of Silicon Valley, could face a 20-year sentence if convicted of the charges, multiple counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Her lawyers have argued in pretrial filings that the government has cherry-picked anecdotes from the seven million to 10 million total test results generated by Theranos over the three years it tested patient blood.
Theranos dissolved in 2018, following the criminal charges against Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani and a failed attempt to sell the company.
Write to Sara Randazzo at [email protected]
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Appeared in the March 13, 2021, print edition as ‘Pregnancy Delays Trial Of Theranos Founder.’
