After multiple attempts to delay what was apparently inevitable, disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes on Tuesday reported to the federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas to begin her sentence.
Holmes was found guilty of defrauding investors, to whom she made promises of a groundbreaking blood-testing technology that failed to materialize. In November, she was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in prison for three counts of wire fraud.
She was supposed to begin her sentence on April 27, but two days before, her lawyers requested for the 39-year-old former CEO, who recently gave birth to her second child, to be able to stay out of prison while the appeal is in process.
The request delayed the start of her sentence but on May 16, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that she can’t stay out of prison pending the appeal as her appeal does not raise “substantial question” on how the conduct of the trial would result in a reversal of her conviction or a sentence shorter than the one given by US District Judge Edward Davila.
Around the same time as the ruling, Holmes and her former lover and Theranos’ president and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who started his 13-year sentence in April in Southern California, were jointly ordered by a lower court to pay a sum of $452 million in restitution to investors including Rupert Murdoch, Walgreens, and Safeway.
An earlier report by the Wall Street Journal said that inmates at the Bryan, Texas all-female minimum-security prison are already anticipating her arrival.
“A copy of the bestselling book ‘Bad Blood,’ which documents Theranos’s rise and fall, was spotted in Federal Prison Camp Bryan’s library earlier this year, an inmate who was released in March recalled,” according to the Journal, which added that the book has been checked out and had not been returned.
The facility, which is about 100 miles northwest of Houston where Holmes grew up, houses about 720 inmates serving time mostly for white-collar crimes, low-level drug offenses, and harboring illegal immigrants.
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