Elizabeth Holmes must report to prison on May 30
(CNN) Elizabeth Holmes must report to prison by May 30, a judge said Wednesday, after her last-minute bid to avoid starting her sentence was rejected by an appeals court a day earlier.
In a filing Wednesday, Judge Edward Davila, who presided over her trial, ordered Holmes to surrender to the Bureau of Prisons by May 30 to begin serving her 11-year sentence for defrauding investors while running the failed blood-testing startup Theranos . .
Holmes was previously ordered to begin his sentence on April 27. Days before she was to begin her prison term, however, Holmes filed a last-minute appeal with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, seeking to remain free on bail as she fights to overturn her conviction.
In a Tuesday filing, the Ninth Circuit Court denied her request to remain free on bail pending her appeal. In a filing on Wednesday, lawyers for Holmes asked Davila to set a new surrender date of May 30, saying she needed to make preparations including medical and childcare arrangements before beginning her sentence. Davila later agreed to the new surrender date.
The district court previously recommended that she serve out her term at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas.
Separately on Tuesday, Davila ordered Holmes and her ex-boyfriend and former Therano COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani to pay restitution of about $452 million to the victims of their crimes. Holmes and Balwani “will be jointly and severally liable for this sum,” Davila wrote in the filing, meaning each could be individually liable for the entire amount.
Balwani was indicted along with Holmes and convicted of fraud in a separate trial. He reported to prison last month to begin serving his nearly 13-year sentence, after losing a last-minute appeal similar to Holmes’.
Holmes dropped out of Stanford at age 19 to focus full-time on Theranos, the health-tech startup that claimed to have invented technology that could accurately test for a variety of conditions with just a few drops of blood. Theranos raised $945 million from an impressive list of investors and was valued at around $9 billion at its peak — making Holmes a paper billionaire.
The company began unraveling after a 2015 Wall Street Journal investigation reported that Theranos had only ever performed about a dozen of the hundreds of tests it offered using its proprietary technology, and even those with questionable accuracy. It also emerged that Theranos relied on third-party manufactured devices from traditional blood testing companies rather than its own technology.
