Throughout Elizabeth Holmes’ criminal prosecution from 2021 to 2022, critics accused the disgraced Theranos fraudster of twice getting pregnant and using her status as a mother of young children to avoid prison and gain sympathy.
But in a new interview with People magazine, from the federal prison camp in Texas where she’s serving an 11-year sentence, the infamous Stanford drop-out insists that wasn’t the case. Holmes, 41, told People that she always wanted to be a mother and found a willing and loving partner in hotel heir Billy Evans. Holmes tried to explain to People that getting pregnant with son William, 3, and daughter Invicta, 2, “wasn’t planned.” She said the pregnancies just “happened” to occur before her trial started in 2021 and after she had been convicted in 2022 on fraud and conspiracy charges.
“I know how the optics look, but I always wanted to be a mother,” Holmes told People. “I truly did not think I would ever be convicted or found guilty. I kept talking to my lawyers and they also assured me we would never get this far.”
“It wasn’t planned and I can’t worry about what others think,” she also said.
Critics also would say that Holmes’ ego and arrogance kept her from entertaining the idea that she’d ever be convicted, or that she’d be hit with a lengthy prison sentence that would force her to leave her children without regular contact with their mother during their crucial early years.
“It kills me to put my family through pain the way I do,” Holmes also said. “But when I look back on my life, and these angels that have come into it, I can get through anything. It makes me want to fight for all of it.”
Holmes is expected to be away from William and Invicta until August 2032, when they will be 10 and 9, respectively. U.S. Bureau of Prison records show that she’s shaved about two years off her sentence, possibly by meeting conduct standards or by participating in recidivism-reduction and “productive activities” programs.
At least Holmes enjoys the benefit of having regular, twice-weekly visits with her children because Evans was willing and able to relocate close to her minimum-security Federal Prison Camp Bryan, north of College Station, Texas. That’s not a benefit experienced by many incarcerated mothers, whose families are poor and don’t have the time or money to travel to federal or state prisons that tend to be built in remote locations, prison experts say.
According to People, Evans brings William and Invicta to visit Holmes for a few hours twice a week, where the children snuggle in her lap or “talk excitedly about insects, ant farms and sea creatures,” People reported. William builds Legos and Invicta “dismantles” them, all under the watchful eye of guards and amid “the beeping sounds of metal detectors.”
Last year, the Daily Mail also published photos of a smiling Holmes, enjoying a visit in the prison yard with Evans and her children for her 40th birthday. The photos showed Holmes running around the prison’s grassy yard with her toddler son, holding her daughter or enjoying a brief hug from Evans.
But for family every visit, their time is soon up, as People sympathetically recounted. For Holmes, watching her children leave “shatters my world every single time,” she told People.
Holmes — otherwise known as inmate Inmate No. 24965-111 — was found guilty in 2022 on four counts of fraud and conspiracy, related to allegations that she defrauded investors in her failed Palo Alto-based blood-testing startup. Theranos, once valued at $9 billion, claimed that its machines could conduct more than a thousand tests — for everything from cancer and diabetes to pregnancy and HIV infection — using just a few drops of blood from a finger-prick.
Holmes gave birth to William in July 2021, weeks before her fraud trial began in U.S. District Court in San Jose. She told People that she and Evans, whom she met at a rooftop charity event in Oct. 2017, decided to start a family, even as the Theranos scandal was unfolding and she faced legal jeopardy. “I asked him 20 times if he wanted to spend his life with me,” she recalls. “There were a million reasons why not.”
Before Holmes was scheduled to be sentenced in November 2022, she revealed that she was pregnant again, and she was visibly pregnant at that hearing. Before that hearing, her legal team argued that she should receive no prison time, or just 18 months, because she was never motivated by “personal gain or greed” and because she is a “humble, hardworking, compassionate” woman. As during her trial, Holmes insisted on her innocence, referring to “business mistakes,” not fraud, as causing Theranos to fail. Her sentencing filing also cited her status as the mother of a new baby, with another on the way, as a reason the court should grant leniency.
“Her suffering, including among other things extreme public ignominy, financial bankruptcy and the terrifying prospect of incarceration while the mother of a new baby, provides more than ample deterrence to others,” the filing said.
In his sentencing letter, Evans wrote that a long sentence would mean Holmes would miss out on key milestone moments in her young children’s lives. “My heart is broken with the thought of spending any days away from Liz, for a future in which my son grows up with a relationship with his mother on the other side of glass armed by guards,” Evans’ letter read.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila didn’t seem to consider Holmes’s recent motherhood in handing down her sentence, but her lawyers used the birth of her daughter to delay the start of her prison term to May 30, 2023.
According to People, Holmes used a high-tech breast pump to collect milk for her then-3-month-old daughter as she was driven to the federal prison camp to surrender herself. “I wanted my daughter to have her mother’s milk,” Holmes told People. “It was important to me because it was a way to love her in here.”