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- Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to defraud on Monday.
- All four charges that the Theranos founder was convicted of were related to investors, not patients.
- A juror from the trial explained to WSJ why they didn’t convict Holmes on patient-related charges.
Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty on 4 of 11 counts of fraud and conspiracy on Monday after a four-month federal trial. Notably, the Theranos founder wasn’t found guilty on any patient-related charges; all of the charges she was convicted of were related to investors.
Now, a member of the jury has explained why this was the case.
Susanna Stefanek, an editorial manager at Apple who served as juror No. 8 in Holmes’ trial, told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that she and her fellow jurors thought Theranos’ lab was poorly operated but didn’t think the evidence proved Holmes deliberately planned to get patients to pay for flawed tests.
“If all we’d had to prove was that she knew there might be problems in the lab and that might end up harming patients, that would be one thing,” Stefanek told the Journal.
Stefanek added that patient Erin Tompkins’ testimony didn’t sway the jury much. Tompkins had testified in the trial that a Theranos test she took in 2015 showed a false positive HIV antibody result.
Stefanek also told the Journal what the jury thought of Holmes’ allegations of abuse by her former boyfriend and business partner. Holmes had testified that Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Theranos’ one-time president and COO, emotionally and physically abused her during their relationship.
Stefanek said the jury viewed Holmes’ testimony of abuse with “cynicism that it was a sympathy ploy” and ultimately thought it was irrelevant to the trial.
Read the Wall Street Journal’s full juror interview here.
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