Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos insanity defense, claimed she was suffering from a mental illness when she defrauded her investors out of millions with her fake blood testing technology according to Bloomberg.
Elizabeth holmes the former billionaire ceo of the blood testing company terranos is famous for the quote first they say you’re crazy then they fight you and then you change the world she said that on mad money the jim cramer television show and it would appear based on this weekend’s news that elizabeth holmes herself is now saying that she’s crazy okay so
Anyone who’s been following the news will know all about elizabeth holmes she built up this company terranos to a multi-billion dollar evaluation she had a board of directors of some of the most famous people in the world some really big names people like henry kissinger and so on were on the board of theranos and then it all came out that the whole company was
A fraud that the machine that she had built that was able to do all of these blood tests with just the prick of a finger didn’t work in any way and it had been it had been rolled out to companies like walgreens and so on they were talking about using it in the us army there was all sorts of applications apparently for this technology and it turned out that the
Technology didn’t work didn’t exist the whole thing was a fraud this came out i believe it was a wall street journal a journalist named john kerry who i think was his name i’ll put a link to his book in the description below but he uh wrote an article exposing the fraud that was terranos and elizabeth has since been arrested and charged with criminal fraud so
The news this weekend from bloomberg says that elizabeth is claiming insanity now i think many of you have heard about this story will have heard all of the kind of crazy stories about elizabeth she put on this fake deep voice that she thought was impressive to people she apparently didn’t blink when she spoke to people now obviously i try and do the same thing
But of course i do blink i just edit them all out of my videos but i feel that it’ll give me a much more impressive appearance to the people watching um the other thing of course that’s entertaining is the whole steve jobs cosplay you know that she would wear the the black turtleneck all the time and apparently she watched videos of him and mimicked his body
Language she copied the style of furniture that he had in his office and things like that which is all uh a bit wacky one of the funnier stories is that she had a dog that she named balto that was i guess a husky and she would go around telling everyone that he was an actual wolf which you know is a little bit odd but once again a little bit odd is different to uh
You know insane in a defense case and firstly i have to say i i’m in no way going to uh come out and say that she’s not insane i think if a person identifies as being insane they’re they’re entitled to that and it’s i’m no judge of insanity i can’t prove whether anyone is insane or not and it’s really it’s it’s none of my business but that’s not really the way a
Court case works so essentially it’s quite difficult for a defendant to prove in a federal court that they were insane in uh you know building up a multi-billion dollar company with a fraudulent technology and uh hiding all of the evidence and so on it becomes difficult to to make that claim simply because you have to show that at the time severe mental disease
Or defect uh made it such that you were unable to appreciate the the wrongfulness of your act so the sort of two ways that it can be looked at one is that a defendant can claim that they did not know what they were doing at the time and you know that they were in sort of such a uh rage that they in in no way understood that they built up a multi-billion dollar
Company that was based on a fraudulent technology and you know that it’s a difficult angle to take uh to claim that you you did not you were not aware that you were doing this the other defense it could be that she didn’t know that what she was doing was wrong now the problem with using that defense is quite simply that there’s an awful lot of evidence to show
That she went out of her way to conceal what she was doing that the product wasn’t working and she hired all sorts of lawyers to intimidate people who were kind of whistleblowers in the complaint and that kind of thing so it’s very problematic the defense doesn’t make an awful lot of sense now the bloomberg article that i read uh this morning says that there’s
Very strong evidence in this case you know that the the prosecution of strong evidence and that possibly her lawyers are just desperate and they are hoping instead of this defense working in the court the ideas may be more that it gets some sympathy from the jury and that they might even possibly acquit her just because they feel bad for her so that’s kind of
The just the quick video i just wanted to put this one up as a quick weekend video because i found it slightly entertaining um i i would note that i i find uh you know some of elizabeth holmes wackiness and a lot of this sort of silicon valley craziness amusing but of course there’s nothing amusing about what she actually did and that a ton of people invested a
Lot of money in a fraudulent company and lost it much more serious is the immorality of voicing a fake blood testing device on the world if she had sort of claimed to make a coffee maker that didn’t actually work um you know that would be not a good thing to do but it’s not quite as evil as a blood testing device that landed lots of people in the hospital due
To inaccurate results that they were getting back from these tests with a device that essentially just in no way worked so that’s really it for today uh please hit the like button and the subscribe button if you’d like to see more videos of this style and you can tell me what you think of this whole case in the comments section below see you later
Transcribed from video
Elizabeth Holmes Insanity Defense By Patrick Boyle
