Authorities Say That Elizabeth Holmes Tried To Flee To Mexico After She Was Convicted
From Time magazine to time behind bars. One of this century’s greatest scammers, Elizabeth Holmes, is soon to be jailed despite being too pretty for it. After promising multiple high-profile investors that the Edison, her blood testing machine, would revolutionize the medical industry, Elizabeth got into some hot water once it was discovered that it was just a slightly used scanner that she picked up from behind an Office Max. What happens when you’ve been caught up in fraud, and the feds are after you? You skip town to Mexico, of course! According to prosecutors, Elizabeth hatched a plan to escape the country and booked a one-way flight to Mexico. SPOILER ALERT: much like the Edison, it didn’t work.
In addition to Steve Jobs’s her signature turtlenecks and having a voice as deep as James Earl Jones’s, Elizabeth became well-known in the startup/investor/scamming community for running Theranos, a company that supposedly could diagnose all disease with just a drop of blood. Unfortunately, science isn’t rooted in magic, and it turned out that Elizabeth and her ex-boyfriend/co-executive Sunny Balwani were lying. This upset investors such as the Walmart family, Rupert Murdoch, and Betsy DeVos, so Elizabeth was promptly put on trial for her crimes. Despite arguing that she should only get 18 months under house arrest because she was really sowwyyyy, the disgraced CEO was sentenced to 11.25 years in clink. Elizabeth quickly appealed the decision, and it is through this proceeding that her Cancun plans emerged. via CNN:
Elizabeth Holmes made an “attempt to flee the country” by booking a one-way ticket to Mexico departing in January 2022, shortly after the Theranos founder was convicted of fraud, prosecutors alleged in a new court filing Friday.
The claim that she tried to leave the country last year surfaced as part of a new filing from prosecutors arguing that Holmes should begin serving her prison sentence rather than living on an estate reported to have $13,000 in monthly expenses for upkeep.
In the filing, prosecutors argue Holmes has not shown convincing evidence that she is not a flight risk, as her lawyers have stated, and used the alleged 2022 incident to support their concerns that she could pose such a risk.
“The government became aware on January 23, 2022, that Defendant Holmes booked an international flight to Mexico departing on January 26, 2022, without a scheduled return trip,” the court filing states. “Only after the government raised this unauthorized flight with defense counsel was the trip canceled.”
Prosecutors went on to say that now that she’s been convicted, her motivation to skip town is even greater. Elizabeth’s attorney pinky swore that she was simply trying to go to a friend’s wedding. I mean, haven’t we all booked an innocent one-way trip to a foreign country for a “wedding” while awaiting the verdict in a fraud case? This bombshell doesn’t help her cause and flies in the face of her previous argument that she was not a flight risk, just a woman who has something against purchasing round-trip tickets. Prosecutors are focused on ensuring Elizabeth begins her sentence in April of this year as “there are not two systems of justice – one for the wealthy and one for the poor.” The lesson here is that you never scam the super wealthy. Yeah, they’ve got the money to invest in your fake business, but they’ve also got the money to buy you a one-way ticket to prison!
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