But make no mistake: They did not act in a vacuum.
To be sure, if Maxwell and Holmes are found guilty of the charges against them, accountability through the criminal justice system is warranted. Holmes' claims" by securing access to its financial records as a part of their due diligence.įor her part, Maxwell's lawyers are expected to argue that she was only charged because Epstein unexpectedly died by suicide in jail, that "guilt by association" is not a crime, but that the public has scapegoated Maxwell as the one to blame. As reported by the New York Times, her position is "that the investors were the ones at fault for not digging into Ms. Holmes's lawyers are pushing back on the narrative that she is to blame for the Theranos losses. Billionaire media tycoon Rupert Murdoch had a $125 million stake in Theranos, which he reportedly sold in 2017 for $1. She obtained another $945 million from well-known venture capitalists, as well as from heirs to the Amway, Walmart and Cox Communications fortunes. To be clear, only Maxwell and Epstein have been charged with criminal wrongdoing.Īs for Holmes, her list of investors included $100 million from Michigan's DeVos family. The address book and flight logs from Epstein's four helicopters and three planes also reportedly contain big names, including former mayors, governors and presidents as well as royalty, actors and supermodels. Jurors in the Maxwell case could hear about her alleged "little black" address book containing the contact information about young women and girls. They are not remotely low-income - and they are startlingly well connected. This is where the cases of Ghislaine Maxwell and Elizabeth Holmes significantly depart from statistical norms. As a result, their kids are more likely to be placed in foster care, significantly increasing their chances of homelessness and entanglement with the criminal justice system. Over 60 percent are mothers with children under the age of 18 and their sole caregivers. Regardless, incarcerated women in America tend to be low-income. Black women were 1.7 times more likely to be incarcerated than white women in 2019, although between that year and 2009, the rate of imprisonment had declined by 60 percent for Black women and climbed for white women by 41 percent. That is a rate of growth twice as high as that of men over the same period. prisons surged by over 700 percent from 1980 to 2019. Yet, according to the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy center focused on reducing racial disparities and incarceration in the criminal justice system, the number of women in U.S. In fact, in fiscal year 2020 women accounted for only 12.3 percent of sentenced federal offenders. In the age of the #MeToo social movement, it feels unusual to witness these kind of serious criminal charges brought against women. They wound up on trial because of their deep involvement with some very powerful people. While no one would equate the charges of child sexual abuse with alleged fraud, Maxwell and Holmes share a number of uncommon but notable characteristics: They are both women. Holmes's trial is in now in its 12th week on claims that she and a co-worker, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, "used advertisements and solicitations to encourage and induce doctors and patients to use Theranos's blood testing laboratory services, even though knew Theranos was not capable of consistently producing accurate and reliable results for certain blood tests." Second, the alleged wire fraud on the part of Elizabeth Holmes, whose charges stem from her blood testing start-up company, Theranos.
She faces six counts, including enticing and transporting a minor to travel to engage in criminal sexual activity and conspiracy to commit those offenses. Maxwell's federal criminal trial began on Monday. In a rare turn of legal events, two high-profile women stand trial in two federal courtrooms this week on criminal charges more commonly lodged against men:įirst, the alleged sexual predation on the part of Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite and close confidante of the late Jeffrey Epstein, a registered sex offender.
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