That same year, Ms. Holmes was indicted on fraud charges. Her trial began on Sept. 8 after numerous delays. Prosecutors outlined six main areas of Ms. Holmes’s alleged deception, including lies about the abilities of Theranos’s technology, its work with the military and its business performance.
The government called former Theranos employees to testify that the start-up’s technology regularly failed quality-control tests, returned inaccurate results and could perform only a dozen tests, rather than the hundreds that Ms. Holmes claimed. Doctors and patients spoke about how they had made medical decisions based on Theranos tests that turned out to be wrong.
Prosecutors also showed a set of Theranos validation reports that bore the logos of pharmaceutical companies that had neither prepared nor signed off on the conclusions therein. They showed letters to investors in which Ms. Holmes falsely claimed Theranos had military contracts and emails from employees that said the company hid device failures and removed abnormal blood test results.
In testimony, investors and pharmaceutical executives said that Ms. Holmes’s misleading claims had led them to invest millions of dollars in Theranos or sign contracts with her company.
“The government spent a lot of time putting in evidence about not just one particular alleged misrepresentation, but several,” Mr. Melendres said. “If you line up three, four, five, a half-dozen misstatements, it gets harder for the jury to pull together on anything other than that there was an intentional scheme.”
Last month, Ms. Holmes took the stand and painted herself as a well-meaning entrepreneur who was naïve and relied too much on those around her. She said she had been emotionally and physically abused by Ramesh Balwani, Theranos’s former chief operating officer and her former boyfriend. Mr. Balwani, who faces identical fraud charges to Ms. Holmes and faces trial next year, has denied the allegations.
On Thursday, Mr. Schenk focused on the facts and evidence, in contrast to Ms. Holmes’s emotional performance on the stand. He walked through the witnesses one by one and outlined each of the 11 counts against Ms. Holmes. At times, he instructed jurors to write down exhibit numbers to refer back to during deliberations.
