Elizabeth Holmes’ last-ditch effort to avoid prison time while appealing her fraud convictions was denied this week, paving the way for her 11-year sentence to begin.
Holmes was originally ordered to surrender herself on April 27, a date that the judge in her case upheld last month despite the Theranos founder’s request to stay out of jail amid her attempts to overturn her four guilty verdicts or secure a new trial. The day before she was set to turn herself in, however, Holmes’ legal team filed a last-minute appeal of Judge Edward Davila’s decision, automatically triggering a delay in her prison start date.
The latter appeal was overturned on Tuesday. In a one-page filing, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that Holmes hasn’t sufficiently proven that an appeal of her convictions would result in a reversal, a new trial or a different sentence—let alone that there’s any legal justification for an appeal at all.
With all of her options for delaying prison time now exhausted, Holmes must report to prison—though the appeals court didn’t set a new surrender date in the filing. The judge has recommended that she spend the 135-month sentence at the minimum-security, all-female Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas.
Also on Tuesday, Davila finally handed down a decision on the amount that Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Theranos’ former COO and president, will have to pay in restitution. According to the judge’s opinion, Holmes and Balwani will be “jointly and severally liable” for a total of $452,047,268.
In its case against the duo, the U.S. government had asked for restitution of either nearly $900 million—split among all Theranos investors and its former partners Walgreens and Safeway—or, alternatively, full restitution to the investors that the judge had singled out in making his sentencing decisions for Holmes and Balwani.
Davila took the latter approach. The $452 million will be split between just 12 identified victims, plus both retail chains. Of the individual investors, the judge wrote in the opinion, “For each of these investors, the court identified specific reliable evidence indicating that they were induced to invest in Theranos by defendants’ misrepresentations as part of the fraud conspiracy.”
The largest pieces of the restitution pie will go to Rupert Murdoch and the DeVos family’s RDV Corp., who will receive about $125 million and $100 million, respectively. Walgreens and Safeway, meanwhile, have been granted repayments of $40 million and $14.5 million.
Balwani has already reported to prison to begin his own 13-year sentence. He received a slightly longer sentence than Holmes because he was found guilty on all 12 counts of fraud for which they were both tried—spanning investor and patient victims—compared to Holmes’ four guilty counts only for investor fraud.
Like Holmes, Balwani is also appealing his convictions and attempted to use that process to stave off his own start date. To no avail: After his mid-March last-ditch delay was rejected in early April, he reported to FCI Terminal Island prison in San Pedro, California, on April 20.