Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes got a double dose of bad news on Tuesday as a U.S. district Judge ordered the disgraced executive to pay $452 million in restitution to the victims of her crimes, and she also lost her bid to remain out of prison while seeking to overturn her conviction. Holmes is being held jointly reliable for the restitution alongside her former romantic and business partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who is currently in prison on a number of felonies including wire fraud.
Holmes was found guilty of defrauding investors out of more than $100 million through Theranos, which claimed to have technology that could perform accurate blood tests with a mere fraction of blood that a normal draw would necessitate.
She was sentenced to 11 years in prison last November, followed by three years of supervised release. Right after her conviction, she bought a one-way ticket to Mexico in an “attempt to flee the country,” prosecutors said.
Holmes was found guilty of four federal charges — three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud — but after 45 hours of deliberation, the jury could not reach a verdict on three other counts of wire fraud. The jury of eight men and four women eventually found Holmes not guilty of those three additional counts.
The executive and purported inventor was the subject of the Emmy-winning Hulu limited series “The Dropout” starring Amanda Seyfried and was to be the subject of a film from director Adam McKay and starring Jennifer Lawrence, but Lawrence backed out of the project after being blown away by Seyfried’s performance in “The Dropout.”
