After being sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding Theranos investors back in November, company founder Elizabeth Holmes is petitioning to delay the start of her time behind bars because she has “two very young children” to be with, per CNN.
This filing confirms that Holmes has given birth to her second child following her November sentencing, during which she was pregnant. Holmes is supposed to begin serving her sentence by the end of April, which Holmes and her legal team are set to appeal later this month.
Holmes’ lawyers maintain that the Theranos founder is not a flight risk, despite her having booked a one-way ticket to Mexico in January last year, which was flagged and cancelled. Holmes’ trial was initially to start in March 2021, but was delayed to August of the same year because she was pregnant with her first child.
Having founded her blood-testing startup Theranos in 2003 while attending university. She dropped out to run the company full-time. Holmes drew significant media attention and investor interest after claiming Thernaos was developing a reliable and comprehensive blood testing method which only required a finger prick.
It would later be discovered that Theranos was misleading their investors by falsifying their results, and Holmes was then trialed and sentenced for fraud. The whole fiasco was turned into a dramatized television miniseries on Hulu called The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried.
A hearing regarding Holmes’ appeal has been scheduled for March 17.