Earlier this year, lawyers representing Elizabeth Holmes called for the fraud case against the Theranos founder to be tossed, arguing that the indictment was overly “broad” and “full of ambiguity.” Now, Holmes’ team may be taking a different approach. According to Bloomberg News, the disgraced health tech entrepreneur appears to be exploring a “mental disease” defense—that she can’t be guilty of bilking investors and defrauding doctors and patients because she didn’t know what she was doing was wrong. (She has pleaded not guilty to all charges against her.)
Holmes’ attorneys plan to introduce evidence that she has a “mental disease or defect…bearing on the issue of guilt” based in part on testimony from California State University at Fullerton psychologist Mindy Mechanic, Bloomberg reported, but sought to block prosecutors from examining her. Edward J. Davila, the judge overseeing the case, shot that argument down on Wednesday, ruling that the government should be allowed to conduct a videotaped mental health examination of Holmes. “The court agrees with the government that its experts must be permitted to conduct their own examination of defendant Holmes in order to mount an effective rebuttal,” Davila decided.
When the pandemic-delayed trial begins in March, it will be the latest chapter in the stunning and profoundly weird Theranos saga. Holmes had been a rising Silicon Valley star, coming up with the blood-testing company she founded while a freshman at Stanford, stacking her board with prominent figures like James Mattis and Henry Kissinger, and making billions in the process. But investigations by the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou and eventually federal prosecutors revealed the company to be a sham: Edison, its core product, was faulty, and Theranos relied on a third party to administer its tests. Though she made a last-ditch attempt to save her company as the wolves closed in in its final months—purchasing a Siberian husky and naming it “Balto” after the sled dog who persevered, as my colleague Nick Bilton detailed—the floor eventually fell out from under her.
Indictments followed, with Holmes and Chief Operating Officer Sunny Balwani, with whom she was romantically involved, facing charges that could put them away for 20 years. For Holmes’s defense to work, of course, her legal team would have to establish that she’s not merely the Silicon Valley eccentric she styled herself as, but clinically unable to discern right from wrong—a difficult argument to prove. “Contrary to what you may see in the movies,” former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade told Bloomberg, “an insanity defense in federal cases is rare and hard to fake.”
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