Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes faked her voice? What ex employee said

Elizabeth Holmes faces the possibility of 20 years behind bars for each conviction.

Elizabeth Holmes, fallen US biotech star, was convicted on Monday of defrauding investors in her blood-testing startup Theranos, in a high-profile case seen as an indictment of Silicon Valley culture.

Holmes, 37, was found guilty of tricking investors into pouring money into what she said was a revolutionary testing system. The court, however, acquitted her on some charges, and failed to agree on others.

The Theranos CEO was famously known for her husky voice and dark-coloured turtleneck sweaters that evoked tech legend and Apple founder Steve Jobs.

There have been allegations that Elizabeth Holmes, Stanford University dropout faked her voice to sound more authoritative in a male-dominated industry.

“It was maybe at one of the company parties, and maybe she had too much to drink or what not, but she fell out of character and exposed that that was not necessarily her true voice,” Arriola said. “Maybe she needed to be more convincing to project a persona within a room among male VCs I'm not really quite sure,” former Theranos employee Ana Arriola told The Dropout podcast by ABC News.

“When she came to me she didn’t have a low voice...when I next saw her again, she says with this low voice and I’m like, ‘Oh my god.’ It was quite off,” Dr Phyllis Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford, told The Dropout podcast which was released in 2019.

In 2015, a series of explosive articles in The Wall Street Journal and a regulatory audit of Theranos's lab uncovered potentially dangerous flaws in the company's technology, leading to the company's eventual collapse.

In the trial, jurors took seven days of deliberations to reach their verdict, finding her guilty of four counts of tricking investors into pouring money into what she claimed was a revolutionary testing system. The trial took place at a federal courthouse in San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley.

Holmes personally put the logos of pharma giants Pfizer and Schering-Plough, without their permission, onto Theranos reports hailing the company's blood-testing technology, which were then shared with investors.

Holmes faces the possibility of 20 years behind bars for each conviction.

She made no comment as she left the court when asked if she intended to appeal.

(With inputs from AFP)