Elizabeth Holmes testified that there was another reason she left Stanford to build Theranos: In an emotional moment, she testified that she was raped. In the aftermath, she said she wasn’t attending classes and left to pour herself into building her company instead.
“I decided I was going to build a life by building this company,” she said.
Holmes testified that she found comfort in Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who she first met in China after she graduated high school. She was 18 and he was 38.
When she later disclosed to him the trauma of her rape at Stanford, she testifies: “He said that I was safe, now that I had met him.”
Holmes would go on to paint a picture of how Balwani both coached and controlled her.
“He told me that I didn’t know what I was doing in business, that my convictions were wrong, that he was astonished at my mediocrity,” she said, adding that he told her that “I needed to kill the person I was” to become successful.
She testified that he told her that if she wanted to become a good entrepreneur, she needed to spend all her time on the business and only doing things that could contribute to making the company successful. That meant, she testified, not sleeping very much, only eating foods that “would make me pure.”Holmes’ attorney presented handwritten notes from Balwani to Holmes.
“Every morning I will force myself out of bed and spend 30 minutes+ (never a minute less to write what I want from my day,” one note read. “I will never meet … anyone for more than 5 minutes unless I have written down why.”
In the notes, Balwani said she was going about her meetings wrong: “I will always give crisp, clean goals and feedback to my subordinates, even if they don’t like it — especially if they don’t like it.”
Holmes testified: “He was talking about me, and the idea that even if I didn’t have a natural instinct for business I could be taught to overcome that with a formula for business that … he said he would teach me.”
“The single most important ingredient to this secret sauce is Discipline,” a note from Balwani read. The second most important is “self discovery.“
“He said I was a little girl,” and needed to be more serious, Holmes testified.
“He would get very angry with me, and then he would sometimes come upstairs to our bedroom and he would force me to have sex with him when I didn’t want to, because he would say that he wanted me to know that he still loved me,” she said.
She testified that he complained she spent too much time with her family.
“I hate this,” read a text from Balwani.
“He’s angry with me because he feels like when my family came for Thanksgiving I was not paying attention to him and I was distant from him and he doesn’t want to engage with me anymore,” Holmes explained. “This was one of the nights where he came upstairs and did things to me that I didn’t want.”
In court filings before the start of the trial, Balwani’s attorneys said he “adamantly denies” the claims and called the allegations that Balwani verbally disparaged her, controlled what she ate, how she dressed, and who she interacted with, are “deeply offensive to Mr. Balwani” and “devastating personally to him.”
