I did nothing wrong, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes claims from prison

Elizabeth Holmes, the jailed founder of the failed blood testing start-up Theranos, has claimed she did nothing wrong and was “silenced” in her first social media comments since her incarceration.

Holmes, 41, reactivated her account on X with a stream of posts claiming she had been unfairly treated but would eventually get “justice”.

She is two years into an 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors who put more than $US700 million ($1.1 billion) into her company, including Rupert Murdoch and Silicon Valley tycoon Larry Ellison.

Holmes claimed her machine could detect hundreds of conditions from a single drop of blood, but covered up its failures, and was charged in 2018. She is staying in the same Texas prison housing British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for recruiting underage girls for the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.

In a series of X posts, her first in more than six years, Holmes endorsed a post claiming she had done nothing wrong, saying the user was “right about everything”.

When asked what her biggest regret was, she said: “My silence. Never again.” In a separate post she said she “never left… just was silenced”.

She described Bad Blood, a bestselling book about the Theranos fraud, as “scfi [sic]“.

Her first post was a picture and extracts of a speech from Martin Luther King Jr.

She said she was spending her incarceration “reading, learning, thinking” and posted a book list that included a memoir from Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democrat who is now Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence.

She said she had never watched the multiple television shows and films made about her, despite saying in an interview earlier this year that she found it “difficult” to watch one such series.

Holmes has two children with her husband, the hotel heir Billy Evans, the second of whom was born shortly before she entered prison in 2023.

After pleading not guilty, she was found guilty on four fraud counts in 2022, but was not found guilty of defrauding patients. She has exhausted most legal appeals to her conviction, losing an attempt earlier this year to have her case reheard.

She told People magazine afterwards: “I know that when the truth finally comes out, I will be proven innocent.” Earlier this year she described her prison experience as “hell and torture”.

There has been no suggestion to date that US President Donald Trump, who has granted clemency to more than 1600 people so far in his second term, could grant Holmes a pardon.

Holmes – who told friends she wanted to be president – held a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2016, although several of her former investors, including Ellison, have ties to Trump.

Holmes has had her sentence reduced from 11 years to nine for good behaviour, meaning she could be released in 2032.

The Telegraph, London

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