Elizabeth Holmes is seeking a new trial, saying a witness who helped prosecutors secure her fraud conviction has expressed regret.
After the verdict was announced, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes asked for a new trial, claiming that a key witness in her criminal case visited her after the verdict and expressed misgivings about his testimony.
In a court filing on Tuesday, Holmes said she had met Adam Rosendorff, a former Theranos lab director, at her home on Aug. 8 eager to talk to her about how he believed his testimony had been twisted by prosecutors last fall.
A few minutes after arriving at Holmes’ office at about 6 p.m., Rosendorff was greeted at the door by Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, who described Rosendorff in court documents as “disheveled,” with an untucked shirt and messy hair, when he arrived about 6 p.m.
The two spoke briefly, including about the couple’s 1-year-old son, with Rosendorff insisting that he needed to talk to Holmes, and Evans telling the former lab director to leave, according to the filing.
“He said that he wants to help her,” Evans said, noting that Rosendorff’s voice was slightly trembling as he spoke.
“He said he was hurting and that he was in pain.”. During our conversation, I commented that it is easier to break things than to build them.
As he said, it is in the nature of the American people to break things. Apparently, that is what they did to Michael Jackson when he was a child. There are people who build things up only to tear them down later on.”
There have been allegations leveled against a key government witness in the most high-profile trial in Silicon Valley history less than eight months after Holmes was convicted of fraud, and just weeks before she is scheduled to be sentenced.
In the course of Holmes’s trial, Rosendorff testified that he emailed Holmes regarding his concerns that the company’s blood analyzers were not ready for a commercial rollout at Walgreens that was imminent.
Rosendorff explained to Evans that even though he tried to answer the questions honestly during Ms. Holmes’ trial, the government tried to make everyone look bad by trying to discredit him, according to her Tuesday filing.
A lawyer for Holmes said, in its filing, that “under any interpretation of his statements, the statements warrant a new trial under any circumstances.” At the very least, the court should order an evidentiary hearing and permit Ms. Holmes to subpoena Dr. Rosendorff to testify in regard to his concerns.
The misgivings that Rosendorff expressed, without any indication that he lied or that he did not testify accurately, would probably not be enough to convince the judge that Holmes deserves a new trial, according to Michael Weinstein, an attorney not associated with the case.
“In criminal trials, it is not uncommon for witnesses to have second thoughts and how they are perceived by the rest of the jury.
However, it is often the case that those second thoughts do not lead to new trials or anything at all,” Weinstein said in an email. As a result, the burden for that is simply too great.
As a result of Holmes’ involvement in the collapse of the blood-testing startup she founded, which reached a maximum valuation of $9 billion, she has been convicted of defrauding investors and conspiracy to commit fraud.
In July, her ex-boyfriend and former Theranos CEO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who was convicted of similar counts, as well as defrauding patients, as well as the former head of the company, was convicted.
The United States District Judge Edward Davila issued an order rejecting Holmes’ long-shot attempt to have her fraud conviction thrown out on Tuesday, saying that there was “sufficient evidence” for the jury to reach the verdict on Holmes’ behalf.
A new trial is another gamble that almost all white-collar criminal convicts make and that they rarely win when they seek a new trial.
Rosendorff testified at trial that he was “raising the alarm bells” as the chief executive of the company, and he felt it was important that Elizabeth was aware of these issues as the head of the company.
The lawyer who represented Rosendorff during the trial, Daniel Koffmann, declined to comment on the case.
While Rosendorff’s credibility was being tested during the trial, Holmes’ lawyers tried to undermine Rosendorff’s credibility by pointing out that he had worked for other labs with regulatory problems in the past.
As a witness, Rosendorff spent several days on the witness stand and was subjected to a grueling cross-examination by the prosecution.
In 2014 after he had left Theranos, Rosendorff went on to work as a lab director at UBiome Inc., a Silicon Valley medical startup that collapsed in a morass of insolvency, regulatory investigations, and criminal charges, similar to Theranos’.
As Rosendorff acknowledged, in 2021, two regulators who were investigating Theranos almost a decade earlier conducted a review at PerkinElmer, where he was working at the time, as part of their investigation into Theranos.
In his testimony, Rosendorff stated that he learned that the outcome of the PerkinElmer review could result in his license being suspended in the future.
In addition, it turned out that Rosendorff was a source for the Wall Street Journal reporter who reported on the collapse of the blood-testing startup starting in 2015 a result of his stories about Rosendorff.
As a result, he later appeared under a pseudonym in a 2018 book titled “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup”, authored by the reporter John Carreyrou.