What’s Next for Elizabeth Holmes: a Trial, a Wedding and a Movie Starring Jennifer Lawrence
Elizabeth Holmes may no longer be the CEO of her own company, but the one-time Silicon Valley superstar still has a lot on her plate.
In the fall of 2014, the former Theranos CEO was named one of Forbes’s richest women in America and her start-up company was valued at $9 billion. Around 20 months later, Holmes’ net worth was estimated at $0 and she was charged with an “elaborate years-long” fraud having duped millions.
The rise and fall of the one-time Silicon Valley darling, 35, is the subject of HBO’s documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley — and while the film does a good job at explaining Holmes’s fall from grace, it doesn’t answer all of the questions about her life now.
RELATED: Meet The Inventor Elizabeth Holmes: The Woman Accused of Scamming Silicon Valley for $9 Billion
Potential Legal Repercussions
In March 2018, Holmes and her former company president Sunny Balwani were charged with “raising more than $700 million from investors through an elaborate, years-long fraud” by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Holmes and Theranos settled with the SEC, with Holmes agreeing to pay $500,000 and be barred from serving as a director or officer of a public company for 10 years. She has not admitted or denied any wrongdoing with regard to the settlement.
Three months later, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco charged the pair with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Both Holmes and Balwani pleaded not guilty to charges of wire fraud, and if convicted, could face up to 20 years in prison, according to ABC News.
Although a date for the trial has not been set, ABC News reported that both Holmes and Balwani are expected to appear for a status hearing on April 22 in San Francisco.
On the ABC Radio podcast The Dropout, which also chronicled Holmes’ rise and fall, former Theranos software engineer Michael Craig said when he recently ran into Holmes, “she seemed a little bit worn-down, but she didn’t seem like somebody who had done anything wrong.”
RELATED: Elizabeth Holmes Didn’t Have a ‘Low Voice’ When She Was a Student, Claims Stanford Professor
Wedding Bells
Ahead of the release of HBO documentary, it was revealed that Holmes is currently engaged.
Vanity Fair was the first to break the news, reporting in a February story that Holmes is currently living in San Francisco, and “engaged to a younger hospitality heir, who also works in tech” and graduated from M.I.T.
The Daily Mail reported that Holmes’s fiancé is William “Billy” Evans, 27, whose grandparents founded the Evans Hotel Group — which includes three major resorts in California.
While Holmes has kept her relationship with her new fiancé relatively quiet, Vanity Fair reporter Nick Bilton went on to share screenshots of the couple from their private social media pages.
“For everyone asking about Holmes’s social media. It’s private. But here are a few screenshots of her and her fiancé we found online. (I personally find it crazy that she’s being charged with 11 felony counts, thousands of people’s lives were harmed, and she’s as happy as can be.)” he wrote, alongside four photos of the couple.
One of the photos shows the couple kissing, with Evans’s caption: “Happy bday to my best friend. The last year has been the best I’ve ever had.”
The Silver Screen Treatment
Although Holmes’s story has already been told via a book, a podcast and a documentary, it’s also being made into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence.
John Carreyrou — who wrote and reported the Wall Street Journal story that helped break open the Theranos scam — will co-write the script alongside Vanessa Taylor, who earned an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay for The Shape of Water. The film will be based on Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.
No stranger to stories marred by national scandal, Oscar-winning director and former Saturday Night Live head writer Adam McKay will direct. “I can’t wait to get into that story,” McKay, 50, told Vanity Fair in 2017.
The film has been in the works since 2016, but currently has no release date.
