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- Convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes gave her first interview from prison to PEOPLE Magazine.
- Her life behind bars includes clerking for 31 cents an hour and teaching French, according to the magazine.
- Holmes was found guilty in 2022 of fraud in connection with her blood-testing startup.
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has given her first interview from behind bars.
More than 20 months since reporting to prison, her days are far different than the Silicon Valley boardroom and investor meetings she once knew, a new interview with PEOPLE Magazine reveals.
Her new routine includes waking up a little after 5 a.m. and having fruit for breakfast before exercising for 40 minutes, according to the magazine.
“I truly did not think I would ever be convicted or found guilty,” she told PEOPLE. “I refused to plead guilty to crimes I did not commit. Theranos failed. But failure is not fraud.”
An inmate handbook for the federal minimum-security women’s prison in Bryan, Texas, where she is incarcerated, says all medically cleared inmates are required to have a regular job for at least 90 days. Holmes has several jobs in the prison, including one as a reentry clerk, for which she makes 31 cents an hour helping prisoners expected to be released soon, PEOPLE reported. She’s also a law clerk and teaches French classes, the magazine said.
Holmes was vegan for years before entering prison and says she mostly sticks to that today, although PEOPLE reports she started eating salmon and tuna after she became anemic her first year behind bars.
Holmes told the magazine she spends some time reading; she recently finished the “Harry Potter” series and Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act: A Way of Being,” among other titles. She also tends to talk to her family twice a day by phone. Holmes shares a young son and daughter with her partner, Billy Evans.
In January 2022, Holmes was convicted on one count of conspiracy to commit fraud on investors and three counts of committing fraud on individual investors in connection with her blood-testing startup, Theranos.
She was acquitted of all four fraud and conspiracy counts related to patients, and the jury couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict on the three remaining counts of fraud on individual investors.
Holmes had said Theranos would revolutionize healthcare by testing for hundreds of diseases using only a few drops of blood.
At its peak, Theranos was valued at $9 billion and Holmes at one point became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, with a net worth of $4.5 billion. The company’s public downfall began in 2015, when then-Wall Street Journal journalist John Carreyrou reported Theranos was using third-party blood-testing machines because its own couldn’t provide accurate results.
Federal agencies began investigating Theranos, the SEC brought charges against Holmes and the company in 2018, and the company shut down that year.
In May 2023, Holmes reported to Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, about 100 miles from Houston, where she grew up, to begin serving her sentence.
Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in prison, though her sentence has since been shortened. Her expected release date is now April 3, 2032, according to Federal Bureau of Prisons records.
Holmes has therapy for PTSD once a week and counsels other prisoners who are rape survivors, PEOPLE reported. She testified during her trial that she was raped while a college student at Stanford University and that Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Theranos’ former president and COO who once dated Holmes, emotionally and sexually abused her. Balwani has denied the allegations.
In his trial, separate from Holmes’, Balwani was convicted on 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison and three years of probation.
In addition to their prison sentences, Holmes and Balwani were ordered to pay $452 million in restitution.
