Elizabeth Holmes Admits Doctoring Lab Reports With Pharma Company Logos (nbcnews.com) 97
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Theranos founder and former CEO Elizabeth Holmes returned to the witness stand Tuesday, confirming key aspects of the prosecutor's allegations behind the 11 counts of fraud she faces, but asserting that there was nothing wrong in what she did. The prosecution has repeatedly shown jurors lab reports emblazoned with logos of the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Schering-Plough. Witnesses from those companies who worked with Theranos testified that the use of the logos was unauthorized and they were unaware of it at the time. Holmes admitted that she was the one who had added the logos to Theranos lab reports and sent them to Walgreens as she pursued a deal to put her blood-testing startup's diagnostic machines in the pharmacy's retail stores. "This work was done in partnership with those companies and I was trying to convey that," she said by way of explanation. "I wish I had done it differently," she added.
Addressing another key point made by the prosecution, Holmes said that when Theranos switched from using on-site analyzers to process samples to a centralized lab approach, it used third-party devices rather than its own equipment as an "invention" because there were too many samples to handle. Witnesses have testified that Theranos' signature blood-testing machine repeatedly failed quality assurance tests and delivered erroneous results. Holmes said the company didn't tell its business partners about this arrangement because it was a trade secret. She rebutted the prosecution's arguments about some of the alleged misrepresentations she made to investors, the media and business partners, affirming that she had received specific positive reports from employees and outside experts and believed their statements to be true.
When presented with company emails and PowerPoint presentations, defense attorney Kevin Downey asked Holmes about specific instances brought up by the prosecution. Jurors saw an email sent to Holmes by then-chief company scientist, biochemist Ian Gibbons, about the development of Theranos' fourth-generation device. "Our immunoassays match the best that can be done in clinical labs and work with small blood samples. Generally our assays are faster by a factor of three to 10 than kits," Gibbons wrote. Downey asked Holmes what she took that email to mean. "I understood that the 4 series could do any blood test," she replied. If Holmes is convicted, she could face up to 20 years in prison. She may also face "a $250,000 fine and full or partial restitution to investors, totaling nearly $155 million," adds NBC News.
Addressing another key point made by the prosecution, Holmes said that when Theranos switched from using on-site analyzers to process samples to a centralized lab approach, it used third-party devices rather than its own equipment as an "invention" because there were too many samples to handle. Witnesses have testified that Theranos' signature blood-testing machine repeatedly failed quality assurance tests and delivered erroneous results. Holmes said the company didn't tell its business partners about this arrangement because it was a trade secret. She rebutted the prosecution's arguments about some of the alleged misrepresentations she made to investors, the media and business partners, affirming that she had received specific positive reports from employees and outside experts and believed their statements to be true.
When presented with company emails and PowerPoint presentations, defense attorney Kevin Downey asked Holmes about specific instances brought up by the prosecution. Jurors saw an email sent to Holmes by then-chief company scientist, biochemist Ian Gibbons, about the development of Theranos' fourth-generation device. "Our immunoassays match the best that can be done in clinical labs and work with small blood samples. Generally our assays are faster by a factor of three to 10 than kits," Gibbons wrote. Downey asked Holmes what she took that email to mean. "I understood that the 4 series could do any blood test," she replied. If Holmes is convicted, she could face up to 20 years in prison. She may also face "a $250,000 fine and full or partial restitution to investors, totaling nearly $155 million," adds NBC News.
Failure wasn't an option (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone pointed out that things would have gone a lot better for Elizabeth Holmes if someone had taught her that failure is in fact an option. Instead, she was so afraid to fail that she lied and cheated until she couldn't anymore.
You fail, you shake yourself off, and you try again. Eventually you succeed. Failure is an option.
Re:Failure wasn't an option (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultimately. it matters little if Miss Holmes had realized failure was an acceptable outcome... she participated in the faked the results of rather important medical testing to the detriment of some posiitive number of innocent patients. Unacceptable behavior.
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Considering how much "software piracy" is punished, maybe those faked reports would put her in jail for longer than all the financial misdeeds?
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The part you are missing is that she may have been intentionally trying to mislead people into thinking that those companies actually endorsed the reports she was sending out with their logos on them. Part of the court case is to determine if that was her intent.
I think it is kind of a stretch to say that you put those company logos on the reports just to show that you were working with them and not trying to imply that those companies had endorse the actual contents of the reports.
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If it is a company you were "working with or using their equipment," then you know you're not that company, that they're not your logos.
That it would be misleading to add them to a document that you were preparing, and they hadn't endorsed. A document you had not discussed with the owners of the logos you were adding.
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Holmes must have known she was in deep, deep shit but must hoped that technology might eventually catch up with her lies and it didn't.
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She might have hoped to be able to offer a decent part of what was promised. Even 10% would have been great, and possibly a large improvement over the current state of affairs.
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I can't help thinking of the movie "Tucker: a man and his dream" (and the actual story behind it). There's a scene at a presentation where they're showing the car for, I think, the first time and they're working on it until the last second before presenting. The demo vehicle can't back up, etc. This goes to the press along with details of all the other spit and baling wire techniques that are used in making a prototype. The SEC, goes after them for fraud, etc. In the end, the trial comes to absolutely nothi
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It did not work as well as their optimistic declarations suggested, but it did work.
No, it didn't.
In some fields limited success is fine and we can celebrate small steps forward. In the medical field, the rules are different. You can't have huge percents of false positives and false negatives in medical tests. That is not working.
Maybe you can have appalling accuracy problems in something designed to sort perfectly ripe oranges from unripe or overripe ones and call that a success. But when people will die when you get it wrong, the criteria for "working" are vastly different.
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Another thing that this demonstrated is just how lax the actual standards are for medical testing. Everyone is talking about how bad it is when you get the testing wrong, etc. but it's seeming like there aren't really many safeguards preventing that from happening.
Re: Failure wasn't an option (Score:2)
It does not matter if she honestly wanted and tried to make it work. She raised capital by making claims about their work that she knew to be false. She released products she knew to be faulty. Passionately wanting snake oil to be effective medicine is no excusing for selling it and claiming that it is in fact effective medicine.
Tucker is much more analogous to Elon Musk, the difference being that the latter succeeded. If Tucker had claimed to be making flying cars the comparison would be apt.
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It does not matter if she honestly wanted and tried to make it work. She raised capital by making claims about their work that she knew to be false
Tucker also raised capital by making claims about the work his company was doing and had done that he knew to be false, or at least made various statements for fundraising purposes that he later knew to be false and didn't correct. In court, a lot of the things that the SEC and a lot of the public assumed would be incredibly damning turned out to be basically nothing. They thought they had a huge gotcha in that the first Tuckers were made from parts of other cars from the scrapyard. Then they got sworn stat
Re:Failure wasn't an option (Score:5, Informative)
It's was investors who were screwed over, not patients..
It was assuredly both. There were patients who were told they had a positive result for a disease or reading outside the acceptable norm - falsely. There were also those who were told they had no problems and nothing to worry about - by what later turned out to be mis- or un-calibrated machines. People who relied on Theranos to screen their blood were certainly victims.
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Re:Failure wasn't an option (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I gather, what she wanted to accomplish may have been physically impossible. The volume of blood collected (0.15mL) for analysis by Theranos' device was simply too small to build any level of statistical significance for the types of analysis they wanted to do. And her dream was to conduct hundreds of tests on that one single 150 microlitre sample? Yikes. It's easy to see how these can be the dreams of a 2nd-year university dropout.
Re: Failure wasn't an option (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, absolutely impossible. It is not at all that she was afraid to fail. She had an insane ambition far beyond her ability to realise it. She may have even believed she could do the impossible. It certainly did not help that the media and the corporate world went crazy for their "female Steve Jobs", so desperate to drive a narrative. Her psychopathy, aided by identity politics, ended up a lot of people losing money. Ironically they entirely ignored women actually achieving success, presumably because the kinds of women who are successful are less interested in being paraded around on account of their genitalia.
What she was claiming was immediately at face value nonsensical, akin to a hotdog seller announcing he has developed a faster than light drive. I suppose the hotdog seller might get hyped in the news if he or she would be of the right sex, ethnicity, or sexuality.
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Similar personality to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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A classic reminder that TEDx isn't exactly selective, the main criteria being possession of a microphone and camera, then an audience willing to sit through it. I never understood why TED decided to water down their brand with TEDx.
She's just so incredibly wrong, probably because she doesn't know enough to know what she doesn't know. Technical experts are stuck in their ways for good reason. They know why things are done the way the are. While it may be simpler to not worry about the gauge of wire when wiri
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The inefficiencies alone would be prohibitive not mention the risk to people and pets should there be enough to power to fully charge a phone in less than a month.
Not to mention the fact that you can't actually use your phone while it's charging; the phone has to be facing the transmitter with a clear line of sight.so no putting your hands in the way or holding it horizontally.
IOW you'd be better off putting on on a $5 inductive charging mat for a few minutes (something which already exists).
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It certainly did not help that the media and the corporate world went crazy for their "female Steve Jobs", so desperate to drive a narrative.
Precisely.
People are trying to pivot now and work it into the 2021 narrative, "oh, it was her white privilege that let her get away with it", lol.
No, it was her "OMG, she's a woman in tech!" 'privilege' that let her get away with it. Until about 5 minutes ago, women in general were considered a protected group, an official "minority", etc.
Re: Failure wasn't an option (Score:2)
Sorry, saying the reason this con worked is because she was a she is total bullshit, ugly cons work just as well, hello, Madoff?
There's thousands of vaporware scams, in tech, you pick one that has a woman in charge and say it only worked because she's a woman in tech. Like we've NEVER seen this scam before. LOL, dumbass.
Re: Failure wasn't an option (Score:2)
Different scans work for different reasons. She is a great manipulator of people. She combined this with being a young and attractive women, the wahmen power mentality doing the rest. She herself pursued the 'female Steve Jobs' image. The establishment, being hungry for such a woman feted her because they thought they finally had validation for their narrative.
Certainly being a woman alone wasn't enough. She did what all good con artists do - she played to her strengths.
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No, it was her "OMG, she's a woman in tech!"
No, it was her "OMG, she's a hot woman in tech!"
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There's not just an anti-sexism bias here; there's good old fashioned *social class*. Investment dollars are herd animals, and Holmes entered the game stinking of money. Her father, Christian Holmes IV, was a senior executive at Enron, and her early money came from his contacts who fully understood his bona fides came from his association with the biggest accounting fraud in history. She also raised money from her prep school classmates' parents. Without delivering a *single* genuine thing of value to
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It's interesting that one of the common themes is that rich people and families invested without doing proper diligence.
They had the means (money, contacts) to easily show that Holmes' claims were not true, yet, they gambled their money without trying to validate them.
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That's presuming they predicated their investment on the claims being true. Which some of the later people probably did because of group think. Most people don't do a lot of critical thinking, they look for safety in numbers. But you surely have to wonder about the initial investors in the scheme.
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That's what pisses me off. I don't care that investors lost their shirts while investing in a plainly dubious scheme. The tokenising of groups (e.g. women, blacks) has the long-term effect of people expecting that people from these groups are diversity hires. It makes it harder for women to be taken seriously on personal merit. This yay wahmen nonsense serves only to devalue people who achieve success on their merits, regardless of sex.
Consider Lisa Su as an example. AMD has been knocking it out of the park
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I was at Moto Semi / Freescale when Su was there. She got out of that hellhole and found a good home.
Re: Failure wasn't an option (Score:2)
The fuck does that even mean? Women business leaders commit the frauds?
It was fraud, committed by a woman. People bought the bullshit tech being sold. Not, gee I want to invest in a woman tech company, that happened to be fraud, oh no don't invest in woman led companies again.
Why in the hell are you putting this on women?
Re: Failure wasn't an option (Score:2)
Well, yes. That's the point of identity politics - to categorise and judge people by group identity. Groups are assigned narratives which are then required of individuals. With group identity intentionally made most salient, people come to associate traits and actions with the individual by virtue of their group categorisation. It's not like we have a glut of research into this. We've known for decades the dangers of doing this.
Normal people don't view humans this way. We judge people by their individual tr
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or like a company claiming to have invented a machine that creates energy for nothing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Steorn also got investors to fund their "work" before they went bust.
Re: Failure wasn't an option (Score:2)
Her psychopathy, aided by identity politics, ended up a lot of people losing money. Ironically they entirely ignored women actually achieving success
Just stop, you're insulting our intelligence. These investors didn't lose their money because they were investing in a woman owned business, they lost their money because they invested in a technology that was too good to be true and based on lies. Fraud. Not identity politics fraud, just fraud. A woman committed fraud, her being a woman had shit to do with investors buying the bullshit miracle medical technology being sold.
Oh if it wasn't a female Steve Jobs story (first I've heard this is from you, sp
Re: Failure wasn't an option (Score:2)
That this is your first time hearing of the 'female Steve Jobs' narrative indicates there's a lot you might want to learn before commenting.
There's no shortage of reporting on how she crafted this image, the press leaping on it.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/0... [cnn.com]
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
https://www.bbc.com/news/busin... [bbc.com]
https://www.vanityfair.com/new... [vanityfair.com]
https://amp.ft.com/content/bd9... [ft.com]
Starlight (Score:2)
What is Starlight? It is a revolutionary new plastic which can resist large amounts of heat.
The inventor of it created it when he kept hearing about fires on planes causing them to crash.
He set out to make a fire resistant material that was light enough to be used on airplanes. He ended up with a material that at 1mm thick can outperform the ablative plates on space craft.
So where is this fancy new plastic? Lost in time unfortunately. Only the creator knew
Re:Failure wasn't an option (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps more to the point: She decided that she could do this when she was a sophomore in college. Actual, useful knowledge basically zero, but she put in for patents anyway, and then dropped out to make her millions. A quote from a biographical article really says it all: "Holmes, after only a year and a half at Stanford, decided not to waste any more time on those incapable of being part of a breakthrough future."
As an aside: how broken is the patent system, when you can patent something that doesn't exist, and wouldn't work if it did.
Re:Failure wasn't an op (Score:3)
The billions of dollars of collateral damage is irrelevant. So are any bad medical outcomes as a result of her fraud. She got hers. To most people, th
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As an aside: how broken is the patent system, when you can patent something that doesn't exist
Not at all. Patents are on ideas, not products.
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Not at all. Patents are on ideas, not products.
Patents must be new and novel, original and non-obvious, and useful.
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Something ultimately not working doesn't make the idea (the thing which is patented) any less useful. The exception is when the idea itself is so obviously faulty e.g. perpetual motion machines often get their patents rejected based on utility. The reason being that every moron understands that perpetual motion doesn't exist. However the same idea reparented without the words "perpetual motion" in the title often pass for one simple reason: The USPTO and patent offices the world over are not a department st
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Someone pointed out that things would have gone a lot better for Elizabeth Holmes if someone had taught her that failure is in fact an option.
I mean, she failed to graduate from Stanford (one of her earlier mistakes...it's Harvard you want to drop [cnbc.com] out of [csmonitor.com]). Sounds more like she's a psychopath, like her idol [businessinsider.com].
I think she thought she could get away with it (Score:4, Insightful)
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The problem is she started fleecing billionaires and actual members of The rulling class
Did she?
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Did she?
She had many billionaire investors, including Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, Tim Draper, and others who invested via VC funds. Most of these people had no expertise in medical tech.
She also had big names on her board, including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Jim Mattis, and William Perry. Of course, these people know nothing about medical tech, so it only makes sense to have them on the board if the tech can't stand on its own and may need political pull.
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Is she liable for not pulling the plug sooner when the chief company scientist is telling her: >Our immunoassays match the best that can be done in clinical labs and work with small blood samples. Generally our assays are faster by a factor of three to 10 than kits.
I wondered about that. Did she really have no warning signs that her stuff wasn't working? What was that chief scientist saying?
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That's from an email the defense produced from a guy who committed suicide in 2013, days before scheduled to testify in a Theranos-related lawsuit.
The prosecution has presented testimony from a former lab director who reported problems to her, and she argued with him and provided "implausible" theories she wanted them to use to explain away the problematic results. (women getting prostate-related results)
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She just misunderstood that '"Move fast and break things" didn't include fraud. Especially considering the expertise of those she presented to the media as supporters.
Insofar as the claims she made that experts consider (and any highschool grad) as "impossible" , we seem to be able to accomplish the "impossible" daily.
She's still a scammer.
.
Ian Gibbons (Score:5, Informative)
The biochemist mentioned, Ian Gibbons, intentionally overdosed on acetaminophen and alcohol and died the day before he was scheduled to testify in the trial.
When Theranos company was informed of his death, his wife didn't get return phone call from Holmes, instead a company lawyer demanded she turn over his laptop and any confidential company info.
Re: Ian Gibbons (Score:2)
Always have a dead man's switch when dealing with people connected with billionaires people.
Too bad he didn't kill her first (Score:2)
The rich never seriously suffer for their crimes. Club Fed is merely an inconvenience and she'll sling that ass at some other chumps when she gets out.
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Look at Jordan Belfort (Wolf of Wall Street guy) he spent 22 months in a white collar jail for massive stock fraud schemes. His cell mate was Tommy Chong. Lived like a king for years and gets two years in "jail" with a celebrity. Wrote the book and became rich again. Totally worth it if you ask me.
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When Theranos company was informed of his death, his wife didn't get return phone call from Holmes, instead a company lawyer demanded she turn over his laptop and any confidential company info.
If only Elizabeth Holmes could invent a blood test for heartlessness...
Gaslighting the jury (Score:5, Insightful)
She is trying to con the jury into thinking her actions were completely reasonable and 'business as normal'.
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Good strategy, then blame it on Balwani
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'Gaslighting' is making someone think they are losing their mind. What she is doing is plain old lying.
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Gaslighting is mostly about making people doubt their reality. [wikipedia.org]
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Right, that is what I meant by 'thinking they are losing their mind'. They are questioning their reality. Which has nothing to do with lying to a jury. She isn't getting them to doubt THEIR own reality, she is making up HER own reality and trying to get others to believe it.
Look at the original movie - he (Charles Boyer) wasn't trying to get her (Ingrid Bergman) to believe something false about HIM, he was trying to get her to believe something false about HERSELF. That is the opposite of what is happen
only fraud if the audience believes it (Score:3)
Re: only fraud if the audience believes it (Score:2)
I'm sure some investors knew. I'm equally certain that many were sucked in by the praise lavished on her by the establishment. There's a burning desire by people of a certain political bent to prove that sex differences are social constructed, that women would want to do traditionally masculine things, and would do them if not for patriarchal oppression.
I can understand a genuine hysteria building up around this narrative. Some of the big names she bagged were certainly not idiots abd would not have willing
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"Your honor, it was all just a parody"
I don't think that is a valid excuse in this case.
toxic masculinity (Score:1)
"Why oh why are men attacking successful women like Holmes? How dare they?"
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nobody's doing this, you delusional weirdo, in this article or in this comments section. you're literally constructing a fantasy for the sole purpose of being able to get mad at that fantasy. so basically a typical conservative.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/0... [nytimes.com]
https://www.ft.com/content/bd9... [ft.com]
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Quotes aren't enough nowadays to signal sarcasm. Nyet, you need to have a huge banner in all caps stating
THE FOLLOWING QUOTE IS SARCASM
You won't find nuanced subtly on slashdot.
Thief (Score:1)
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Hmmm. (Score:3, Funny)
Lizzue Holmes-Girl took an axe
And gave Theranos 40 whacks.
When she saw what she had done
Here came another 41.
Her VOICE (Score:2)
All I want to know if she used her fake voice.
If a man used a squeaky or "girly" voice during his hearing, he would be certainly found in contempt.
I am so curious.
Bank robbers faced with footage of their heist (Score:4, Funny)
stated the robbery was done in partnership with the bank, and they wish they had done it differently.
Doctoring (Score:3)
"Up to 20 years" doesn't mean much (Score:2)
She gets plenty of points toward a long sentence for the sheer amount of money involved and for inarguably being in a "leadership role" in the criming. But one of the things on the charts in the Federal sentencing guidelines is criminal history. Someone getting convicted for the first time should not get even close to a maximum sentence.
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Plus, she got herself pregnant while she was out on bail. That's another reason she's going to ask for leniency.
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Plus, she got herself pregnant while she was out on bail. That's another reason she's going to ask for leniency.
Ahh, the time honored tradition of pleading ones belly. Classy.
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Plus, she got herself pregnant while she was out on bail. That's another reason she's going to ask for leniency.
Someone was dumb enough to have a kid with that psycho? WOW.
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More lawsuits? (Score:2)
So, are Pfizer and Schering-Plough going to file their own lawsuits?
Watching a compulsive liar and possible psychopath (Score:3)
It is fascinating to watch her lie so easily and gas light the jury to manipulate them into thinking her actions were totally normal daily business and she as the head of a billion Dollar scam is just a regular every day person.
Also, I wouldnâ(TM)t put it past her to intentionally get knocked up to get sympathy at the trial.
She played the role of CEO, now she is playing the role of the defendant.
Re:Watching a compulsive liar and possible psychop (Score:4, Informative)
'Gaslighting' is making someone think they are going insane. She is just lying.
time travel (Score:2)
People are trying to pivot now and work her into the 2021 narrative, "oh, it was her white privilege that let her get away with it", lol.
No, it was her "OMG, she's a woman in tech!" 'privilege' that let her get away with it. Until about 5 minutes ago, women in general were considered a protected group, an official "minority", etc.