Setting up a defense of cognitive dissonance. Today, in a brief appearance in Federal District Court in San Jose, Elizabeth Holmes returned to the stand to testify in her defense after a start last Friday. Her attorney Kevin Downey walked her through Theranos’ salad days, when the labs were numbered 1.0, cartridges stuck together, and the drug company studies were preliminary. Returning to her deep voice according to reports, she recalled Theranos’ Completed Successes, circa 2009, as many, and the performance as “really good.”
But 2009 was before the fraud with investors really got going. The falsifying of reports from Pfizer and Schering-Plough, for instance, was later. But every single drug company approached for the preliminary studies in those early days, including AstraZeneca at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital, never followed through with Theranos for more, such as a clinical trial or advanced study. Whether Holmes knew from an employee that Constance Cullen of Schering-Plough was less than enthusiastic about Theranos and found Holmes ‘cagey’ is beside the point, when the company later forged the Schering-Plough logo on a report to make it look as if Schering found Theranos’ labs acceptable. Downey took some care with Holmes not to introduce the later forgeries. Yet she was nothing if not persistent with other companies. Holmes pursued a partnership with Pfizer as late as 2015, in conjunction with Walgreens’ Theranos locations as clinical trial sites.
She also testified that the series 4 lab could run any test, despite testimony from her last lab director Kingshun Das, MD that the series 3 could run perhaps a dozen at best and not reliably, leading him to void all tests made in 2014 and 2015. Earlier testimony stated that the series 4 never ran tests on patients.
Holmes’ testimony will continue tomorrow. Then the courts will be in recess for the Thanksgiving holiday until the 29th, which is when the prosecution will have its turn to cross-examine.
“Trying your hardest and coming up short is not a crime,” Lance Wade, another of Holmes’ many attorneys, said during opening arguments. But Holmes has already admitted to a repeated fraudulent claim of legitimacy–having the Department of Defense as a customer where the labs were on medevacs and the battlefield. But if the defense can introduce enough reasonable doubt, also known as cognitive dissonance or plain confusion, about Holmes and her ‘long con’ in the minds of the jury–that she was an entrepreneur with a dream just ‘trying harder’ and she didn’t know or mean to defraud investors as the prosecution claims but caught up in pursuing her noble aims–and add to that mind control by Sunny Balwani, Holmes does not have to be innocent to, as they say downtown, skate. CNBC, The Verge, FT, Mercury News (paywalled)
TTA’s earlier coverage: Chapter 9, Chapter 8, Chapter 7, Chapter 6, Chapter 5, Chapter 4 (w/comment from Malcolm Fisk), Chapter 3, Chapter 2, Chapter 1
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