Elizabeth Holmes lawyers: she was headed to a wedding in Mexico, she wasnt fleeing
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Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison in November after she was found guilty on four counts of defrauding investors in her failed biotech company, Theranos. Holmes, 38, is currently pregnant with her second child and is scheduled to report to prison April 27th. She also has a two and a half year-old son with her husband, hotel heir Billy Evans, 29. In a recent filing for her case related to a request she stay out of prison pending appeal, prosecutors declared her a flight risk. They cited a one-way ticket she booked to Mexico shortly after her conviction. Holmes’ lawyers countered that she had canceled the trip and that it was to attend a friend’s wedding in Mexico. Holmes’ husband did go to Mexico as planned. Prosecutors state he was there for six weeks, but Holmes’ lawyers say Evans only stayed four days.
Convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes has hit back at claims from federal prosecutors that she tried to flee to Mexico with a one-way plane ticket after she was found guilty.
“The government’s newfound claim that Ms. Holmes attempted to flee is baseless,” Holmes’s attorneys wrote in a motion filed Monday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
In a filing on Thursday, prosecutors alleged that Holmes had made an “attempt to flee the country shortly after she was convicted” in January 2022 because they discovered she had planned the Mexico trip but not told them or the court about it.
When they contacted her defense team to alert them of their discovery, Holmes’s lawyers replied via email that the trip had been booked before the verdict with the hope she would be found not guilty and be able to attend a wedding. But they assured the prosecution that she would not be trying to go on the trip now she had been convicted.
Prosecutors also said that Holmes’s husband, Billy Evans, still went on the trip and didn’t return to the US for roughly six weeks, and did so from South Africa, not Mexico.
But in the new defense filing on Monday, Holmes’s attorneys sought to have the court strike out several sections of the prosecution’s filing that she said “present incomplete and provably inaccurate statements of fact” regarding her supposed flight risk.
They noted that Holmes’s passport had been taken from her at the time and that her husband made the bookings on a commercial airline, not a private jet. “None of these are markers of someone trying to make an escape,” they said.
This all sounds suspect considering who we’re talking about. This was a woman who built a biotech empire based on a half baked idea and who lied about it to investors and the public for years. Do Holmes’ lawyers have an explanation for why she booked a one-way ticket? Whatever the case, I hope that she’s required to report to prison as scheduled and isn’t allowed to stay home while her case is appealed. She stole almost a billion dollars and ruined lives. Of course she would try to flee the country.
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