While she was studying at Stanford the following school year, Holmes said Balwani would email her. "I talked to him about wanting to start a company, and a company that I tried to build in high school and I asked for his advice." "I understood that he'd been a really successful business person, that he worked with Bill Gates in the early days of Microsoft," Holmes said. She said she was 18 at the time, and he was 38. Holmes told jurors on Monday that she met Balwani in China. In testimony last week, Holmes said Balwani was in charge of operating the company's labs and handling financial projections. Balwani joined six years later and, until his departure in 2016, served as Holmes' second-in-command.
#ELIZABETH HOLMES TODAY PICTURE TRIAL#
She has pleaded not guilty.īalwani, who's 19 years older than Holmes, faces the same charges and will be on trial at a later date. The Stanford University dropout and former Silicon Valley wunderkind could spend up to two decades in prison if she's convicted. 19, and later that day the defense surprised the courtroom in calling Holmes as a witness. He said it was a distraction to the business."ĭuring the trial's first 11 weeks, the prosecution called to the stand former lab directors, patients, doctors, business partners and investors, as well as journalist Roger Parloff, who wrote the 2014 Fortune magazine cover story, "This CEO Is Out For Blood." Sunny would get very upset if I was with my family. "Because I was trying to focus all of my time on the company. "I saw them less than I'd ever seen them before and I spoke to them less than I had ever spoke to them before," she said. When asked how Balwani's behavior affected her relationship with her family, Holmes said it was particularly damaging. "He would get very angry with me and then he would sometimes come upstairs to our bedroom and force me to have sex with him when I didn't want to because he wanted me to know that he still loved me," said Holmes, occasionally fighting back tears. Holmes told jurors on Monday that for the decade they were together, Balwani persistently criticized her work ethic, "mediocrity" as an entrepreneur and the fact that she "came across as a little girl." Physical abuse would follow, she said. Her attorneys wrote then that Holmes suffered a "decade-long campaign of psychological abuse" at the hands of Balwani. While Holmes mentioned Balwani dozens of times in her prior three days of testimony, the topic of abuse didn't come up until Monday afternoon, as the defense homed in on a central claim it made just ahead of the trial.