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Reporter recalls an important story in the star cast of Elizabeth Holmes

SAN JOSE, Calif. –

The Fortune Journal reporter, whose cover story helped turn Elizabeth Holmes into a Silicon Valley celebrity testified Thursday about how he finally feels like a pawn when his business ventures. advertises what she calls revolutionary blood-testing technology.

Roger Parloff’s appearance in the witness stand marked a pivotal moment in Holmes’ 10-week-old fraud trial.

Federal prosecutors are preparing to wrap up their case, aiming to prove that Holmes defrauded sophisticated investors, retailers and patients while she was CEO of Theranos, a company startup, which she founded in 2003 at the age of 19.

After prosecutors settle the case, Holmes’ lawyers will in turn argue that although Holmes made a mistake in pursuing her bold ambitions, she has never committed any crime. what evil.

Holmes, now 37, could come to her defense; She faces up to 20 years in prison if a jury finds her guilty. She’s been going through an incredible slump since the June 2014 publication of Parloff’s story on the cover of Fortune.

Titled “The CEO of This Is Out For Blood,” the article spurred fundraising efforts that at one point had a valuation of Holmes at $4.5 billion — just a few years before Theranos’ full collapse. scandal in 2018.

Parloff testified that he began working on the story in April 2014 shortly after being approached by representatives of David Boies, a prominent attorney who worked for Holmes and became a member of Theranos’s board of directors. .

Jurors heard and saw evidence that Holmes used Parloff’s article to identify himself as a visionary modeled after Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Holmes repeatedly promised that her breakthrough would come with a blood-testing device called the Edison, which she likened to a laboratory in a compact box that could scan hundreds of potential health problems with a few drops of blood are taken with a needle..

Prosecutors used Parloff’s testimony to play excerpts from about 10 hours of audio recordings he kept of his interviews with Holmes, to support their allegation that she was conducting a sophisticated scam instead of a startup.

The recordings show Holmes making claims about business relationships and blood test successes that were not true at the time she made them, based on evidence presented in the court.

She also emailed Parloff documents showing that Theranos’ technology appeared to have been confirmed by major pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer that in fact disproved Holmes’ claims.

The audio clips also illustrate how engaging Holmes can be.

“It sounds unbelievable,” Parloff told Holmes in one of the taped conversations about her and Theranos’s progress. “It’s one of the special things,” replied Holmes.

As he did in most trials, Holmes stared ahead for more than three hours before Parloff’s testimony.

Filled with quotes from healthcare experts and famous Theranos advocates like former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Parloff’s work has helped Holmes attract billionaire investors.

“It’s a very compelling story,” said Daniel Mosley, a trust attorney and estate planner who previously testified of his pivotal role in helping Theranos raise more than 400 million dollars a few months after the Fortune article was published.

Most of that money came from a small group of Mosley’s customers — the Walton family behind Walmart, the family of former U.S. Secretary of Education Becky DeVos and the family with ties to media conglomerate Cox Enterprises — after Kissinger asked Mosley in July 2014 about taking a closer look at Theranos.

Shortly after an explosive series of articles in The Wall Street Journal pointed out potentially dangerous flaws in Theranos’ blood-testing technology, the morbid Parloff retracted his original cover story last month. December 2015.

That retraction, framed with the subject line “How Theranos cheated on me,” has yet to be submitted as evidence during the trial.

While Parloff voluntarily cooperated with the government in the case against Holmes, he resisted efforts by Holmes’ attorneys to ask him to disclose other information he had gathered while writing story in 2014 and follow-up interviews with Holmes in 2015.

Parloff and his attorneys have successfully argued that most of that information does not need to be disclosed under media protection laws.

The issue of reporter privileges resurfaced on Thursday when one of Holmes’ attorneys, John Cline, re-examined Parloff.

The reporter told Cline he was limited by what he could offer because he threw most of his handwritten notes from his interviews with Holmes a year after they happened. out, according to a standard procedure at Fortune.

Parloff is expected to return to the stands for further questioning on Friday.

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