In a day of intense and emotional testimony, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes told the court of the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse she said she suffered at the hands of company president and chief operating officer Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani and others.
Balwani was Holmes’ boyfriend for more than a decade, much of it during their time leading Theranos, the failed blood-testing startup. The pair hid their relationship from investors and Theranos employees. Balwani has pleaded not guilty to the same fraud and conspiracy charges Holmes faces. His trial begins next year.
Holmes’ attorneys said she met Balwani in 2002 on a language-immersion trip in China. She was 18 years old at the time and a senior in high school. He was in his late 30s and pursuing an MBA at the University of California, Berkeley.
The next year, Holmes attended Stanford University to study chemical engineering. On the stand, she said she was raped during her first year at college, an experience that pushed her to leave school and start Theranos.
“I was questioning how I was going to be able to process that experience and what I wanted to do with my life. And I decided that I was going to build a life by building this company,” she told the court.
Holmes dropped out of Stanford in 2004 to focus on Theranos. Shortly thereafter, she reached out to Balwani and told him about her sexual assault at Stanford. “He said that I was safe now that I had met him,” she testified.
“Astonished by my mediocrity”
Holmes and Balwani started dating in 2005 and soon moved in together. By all accounts, their relationship was intense, and Holmes testified yesterday that Balwani soon grew abusive. He told her how to behave, criticized her tone of voice, and told her she “came across as a little girl and needed to be more serious and pointed and not be giddy in my interactions.” Balwani even went so far as to prescribe her diet and schedule, and he left her handwritten notes, one of which read, “I do not react. I am always proactive. I know the outcome of every encounter. I do not hesitate.”
“He told me he didn’t know what I was doing in business, that my convictions were wrong,” Holmes testified.
“He was astonished by my mediocrity,” she said.
“I needed to kill the person I was,” Holmes said Balwani told her, “to become the ‘new Elizabeth.’”
Later in court, Holmes testified that Balwani would become sexually abusive when he became angry. “He would get very angry with me, and then he would sometimes come upstairs in our bedroom and he would force me to have sex with him when I didn’t want to because he wanted me to know that he still loved me,” she said.
Holmes’ attorney Kevin Downey then showed the court a text message thread between Holmes and Balwani from November 30, 2013, two days after Thanksgiving. In it, Balwani told Holmes, “when ur family is here I feel very lonely.”
“He’s angry with me because he felt when my family came for Thanksgiving, he felt neglected,” she said. “This is one of the nights where he, crying, came upstairs and did things to me that I didn’t want and hurt me.”
After another time she said Balwani raped her, she wrote a note on her iPhone, which said, “Don’t enjoy literally anything about it or who I am if I did it. Hurts so much. So so much. Can’t focus on anything except why? Why hurting myself? Can’t even move let alone do sit-ups or actually sit up. Lying swollen. Literally.”
Later, she texted Balwani, “My job is to love you when you’re stressed.”
“I know,” he replied.
Balwani’s attorney was in court yesterday, according to The Wall Street Journal, and he denied all allegations of abuse against his client.
“Wasn’t who I thought he was”
Holmes said that the breaking point in her relationship with Balwani came after an inspection of Theranos by the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS) in 2015. Before the audit, Balwani told Holmes that “the lab was in great shape, and the audit should go very well.”
It did not. CMS found a number of deficiencies and threatened to bar Holmes and Balwani from running a commercial lab operation for two years. “The findings from those inspections were so fundamentally different from what I believed—that it couldn’t be the case that our operations were running like one of the best companies in the world,” Holmes told the court.
The incident told her that Balwani “wasn’t who I thought he was.” At that point, she decided that she needed him out of the company and that she needed to right the ship on her own.
Holmes broke up with Balwani in 2016. Her brother helped her move out of Balwani’s house when the executive was in Thailand. When Holmes told Balwani, he grew angry and threatened to fly back to the US.
At the end of the day yesterday, the defense wrapped its direct examination of Elizabeth Holmes. She returns to the stand today for cross-examination by the prosecution.
