Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes on Monday testified tearfully that former company president Sunny Balwani, her romantic partner for more than a decade, forced sex on her when she displeased him.
“He would get very angry with me and then he would sometimes come upstairs to our bedroom and he would force me to have sex with him when I didn’t want to,” Holmes testified, adding that Balwani “wanted me to know that he loved me.”
Holmes testified that when she was a student at Stanford University, she was raped. When she told Balwani, whom she looked up to as a successful entrepreneur, about her trauma from the rape, “he said that I was safe now that I had met him.”
Her lawyer Kevin Downey showed the jury what Holmes said were notes made on an iPhone app, after one of Balwani’s alleged attacks in 2015. “Hurts so much. So so much. Can’t focus on anything except why? Why hurting myself?” the notes said. Asked by Downey what she had meant, she testified, “I’m reacting to one of those incidents with Mr. Balwani and I’m writing about the fact that I couldn’t move and couldn’t sit up and I was lying there swollen and I couldn’t understand why I was hurting myself, why I wasn’t leaving.”
Holmes’ testimony is continuing Monday in U.S. District Court in San Jose. In court filings she has accused Balwani of abusing, controlling and coercing her in ways affecting the issue of guilt.
Holmes appeared to begin answering the question raised by those filings, that has hung over her trial:...
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