Elizabeth Holmes,
founder of defunct blood-testing startup Theranos Inc. who was convicted of fraud, has asked a federal judge for a new trial after she said one of the prosecution’s star witnesses visited her house to express regret for his role in her trial, according to a new court filing.
Ms. Holmes said in a filing Tuesday that
Adam Rosendorff,
a former Theranos lab director who testified for five days in her criminal-fraud trial, showed up unannounced at her home Aug. 8. During his visit, Dr. Rosendorff spoke to Ms. Holmes’s partner and said that the government had twisted his testimony that Theranos was “working so hard to do something good and meaningful,” and that he felt guilty “to the point where he had difficulty sleeping,” according to the court filing.
Ms. Holmes is arguing that Dr. Rosendorff’s alleged statements to her partner qualifies her for a new trial or a hearing to discuss the evidence.
Dr. Rosendorff declined to comment when reached by phone Tuesday. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California declined to comment.
The filing is the latest twist in a spectacle-laden criminal-fraud saga that began to play out in court a year ago and became one of the most closely watched white-collar cases in Silicon Valley history. Ms. Holmes in January was convicted on four counts of criminal fraud for deceiving investors while running a yearslong scheme at Theranos, where she was chief executive. Her one-time business and romantic partner, former Theranos president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, was convicted of 12 fraud counts in July.
Ms. Holmes last week requested an acquittal, and during the hearing, her legal team said they had newly discovered information that would help her case but didn’t provide further details. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila denied the motion for an acquittal. Ms. Holmes is scheduled to be sentenced in October, while Mr. Balwani is set to be sentenced the following month.
At his Aug. 8 visit, Dr. Rosendorff didn’t speak directly to Ms. Holmes but to her partner, Billy Evans, who answered the door, according to Mr. Evans’s account of the exchange, which was filed into court record. Dr. Rosendorff looked disheveled, and his voice trembled as he explained that “he feels guilty,” according to the account. “He said he is hurting,” according to Mr. Evans. Dr. Rosendorff explained that he “tried to answer the questions honestly” during the trial but that the government made things sound worse than they were when he was up on the stand during his testimony. He said he felt as though he had done something wrong, according to the account.
Ms. Holmes is arguing that if Dr. Rosendorff had made such statements in court, it would have significantly bolstered her defense and could have swayed a jury.
The government called 29 witnesses, including other former Theranos lab personnel who testified against Ms. Holmes.
Dr. Rosendorff, a central government witness in Ms. Holmes’s trial, testified on concerns he brought directly to her about Theranos’s technology and his efforts to delay the use of the company’s blood-testing equipment on real patients. As lab director from 2013 to 2014, he told the court that he was responsible for helping respond to doctor and patient complaints about Theranos’s inaccurate lab tests and that he was pressured to find excuses for the erroneous results that deflected the responsibility from Theranos.
On his LinkedIn page, Dr. Rosendorff included a link to a news article from the South African Jewish Report that called him the “medic who helped expose Theranos.”
Dr. Rosendorff revealed during the trial that he was a source for The Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Theranos in 2015 before the paper published a series of articles revealing that Theranos’s finger-stick lab tests were unreliable and that the company often relied on commercial machines instead, but even those test results could be wrong.
One of Ms. Holmes’s attorneys,
Lance Wade,
questioned Dr. Rosendorff in often hostile exchanges for nearly four days, much longer than the government questioned him. Tuesday’s court filing said that Dr. Rosendorff on Aug. 8 left a voicemail with Mr. Wade, asking for a meeting with Ms. Holmes. Mr. Wade didn’t respond before Dr. Rosendorff drove to her house anyway, the court filing said.
Write to Heather Somerville at heather.somerville@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the September 7, 2022, print edition as ‘Theranos’s Holmes Seeks New Trial, Cites Witness Take.’