In her Theranos fraud case, Elizabeth Holmes is speaking for herself


Elizabeth Holmes, her hair down and her makeup muted relative to her Theranos days, spelled her name for the court. After the prosecution rested its case in the morning, the defense called her as their third witness, about an hour before the end of the day. She wore a navy blazer with a white blouse — not one of the famous black turtlenecks has made an appearance in court during the months the case against her has dragged on.

Holmes is facing 11 counts of wire fraud from her time as founder and CEO of Theranos. Though her testimony today is the first time she’s spoken for herself, we’ve heard her voice already — in the recordings of Fortune journalist Roger Parloff. In those recordings, she lies confidently about her device’s capabilities. And the lies Parloff recorded were consistent with the lies her investors testified that she told them.

I do not think I am the only person who’s wondered how she’ll explain this. Now, we are going to find out.

So far Holmes hasn’t said much — we’ve learned about her education, the time she spent at Stanford, and that she dropped out to form Theranos. When her testimony ended today, we were still in 2006, well before the period the government alleges any fraud took place, which means most of the juicy stuff will have to wait until next week.

Holmes was cheerful, smiling at her attorney, Kevin Downey. She seemed relaxed and focused. Everyone I know has asked me about her voice. For what it’s worth, the most obnoxious part of The Voice Discourse is that most of these writers have no musical training. She is not and could never have been “baritone,” as Inc wrote — she’s not even a tenor! — and the idea that she’d go up “several octaves” when she speaks normally, as John Carreyrou writes in Bad Blood, suggests a “real” pitch higher than the speaking voice of Kristen Chenoweth. That is nonsense.

Holmes sounds like a normal alto to me, though she has a habit of dropping her voice to punch words she wants to emphasize. Then, she sounds like she has a cold, or perhaps, as Jezebel put it, like she’s using her “impression of a stupid man” voice. If it’s an affectation, it’s one she’s had so long that it’s natural to her now. In any event, most of her speech isn’t at the bottom of her range.

But the voice is part of the famous Holmes persona, which I expect we will be hearing more about in the coming days. The defense has indicated that they expect to continue questioning her all next week; if the prosecution’s cross-exam is shorter than two days, I will be surprised.

The story Holmes told in her testimony is well-known. She dropped out of Stanford and used the rest of the money her parents had saved from her college education, as well as some debt and some money from family friends, to found a company called Real-Time Cures. She later changed the name to Theranos.

Originally, the idea was to create a pill or patch, one that would analyze a person’s blood, allowing for more-precise medication dosing. But people seemed more interested in a tabletop device for blood…



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