Elizabeth Holmes will be going to prison at the end of the month.
The disgraced tech entrepreneur was sentenced to 11 years after being found guilty of fraud charges in connection with her start-up, Theranos, and her false claims that she invented a revolutionary way to test for diseases with a drop of blood, which was found to be untrue in 2018.
The 39-year-old Stanford dropout was originally convicted in November. She tried to appeal her jail term but was thrown out by a federal court, despite her concerns for her two young children with her husband, Billy Evans.
US District Judge Edward Davila said: "Contrary to her suggestion that accuracy and reliability were central issues to her convictions, Ms Holmes's misrepresentations to Theranos investors involved more than just whether Theranos technology worked as promised.”
Prosecutors believed Holmes was a flight risk after she bought a single ticket to Mexico, which Judge Davila, in his ruling, called “ill-advised”.
"Booking international travel plans for a criminal defendant in anticipation of a complete defence victory is a bold move, and the failure to promptly cancel those plans after a guilty verdict is a perilously careless oversight,” he said.
Holmes was once dubbed the “next Steve Jobs”, and her rise and fall inspired a podcast, an HBO documentary, and the Hulu mini-series, ‘The Dropout’, starring Amanda Seyfried.
Her ex-business partner, Sunny Balwani, was jailed for 13 years for fraud last year.
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