In a lawsuit filed Thursday, the legal team of Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO of Theranos, has filed a case seeking the founder’s release from serving a long prison term for defrauding investors.
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“We recognize that this may seem daunting given the public perception of this matter,” the filing said. per Bloomberg.
It asked her to serve locked up in her home for 18 months.
In addition, 130 people associated with the founder, including former Theranos investors and family and friends, have submitted letters of support. The filing argued that the ‘real’ Holmes has been obscured by ‘media vitriol’.
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003, claiming the company had a revolutionary test that could use a much smaller amount of blood to test for a wider variety of diseases, including cancer, raising $700 million for the company. She was extensive profiled in Fortune in 2014, which gave her profile a huge boost.
Her company was valued at nearly $9 billion at the time.
Related: The rise and fall of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes
Then, in 2015 and 2016, reports from the Wall Street Journal exposed that the technology fundamentally didn’t work. Holmes stepped down as CEO in 2018.
Holmes was convicted in January of four fraud-related charges. The story was partially told in Hulu’s “The Dropout,” where Amanda Seyfried won an Emmy for playing the founder.
In Thursday’s filing, as the outlet noted, Holmes again discussed her allegations that she was emotionally and physically abused by business partner Sunny Balwani. He was convicted in another trial in July of 12 fraud counts.
Holmes’s team also said, according to Bloomberg, that she has become a crisis counselor for sexual violence.
The submission is something of a Hail Mary. Some of the counts of fraud for which she was convicted include minimum sentences of nine years, according to the outlet. The prosecution has yet to make recommendations to the judge, US District Judge Edward Davila, for a prison sentence.
This week, the Holmes team can’t get a new trial after he claimed that a key witness had been pressured by the prosecution.
