These days, life is a boring routine for Elizabeth Holmes, the imprisoned former CEO of Theranos, a billion-dollar healthcare start-up that failed in a fraud scandal in 2022.
“I always get up a little after five in the morning. Breakfast is served at 6:30 a.m., and the compound opens at 6 a.m. Holmes, 41, says, “I usually eat pieces of fruit.” “After that, I spend forty minutes each day exercising, lifting weights and rowing. To keep my body and mind healthy, I run a track, lift 20-pound weights, and perform bodyweight workouts.
Holmes has been incarcerated in a federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, for the past two years. She was given an 11.25-year sentence (which was lowered to nine years for good behavior) for her involvement in a healthcare scam that cost investors hundreds of millions of dollars.
Although her young children, a 3-year-old son named William and a 2-year-old daughter named Invicta, are being raised close by their father, Holmes’s 33-year-old partner Billy Evans, they visit their mother at the correctional facility every weekend.
“It’s been pure pain since I’ve been here,” Holmes says in this week’s PEOPLE cover story, discussing her life in prison and being away from her family. “It’s been torture.”
She can cuddle with William and Invicta (Latin for “invincible”) in a plain room with blue plastic chairs and vending machines, or she can watch them look for insects in the prison yard during visitation hours on Saturdays and Sundays, which are the high point of Holmes’s week.
She claims that she had to suppress her tears when visiting hours stop at approximately 3 p.m. “When my family departs, it is tough to say goodbye to them. It seems like giving up again every time. “I never say ‘goodbye’ because I am always with them.”
At the penitentiary, weekdays are workdays. Once heralded as the future Steve Jobs, Holmes is in the facility’s education building by 8 a.m., working as a reentry clerk for 31 cents an hour, assisting released offenders with their resumes and getting ready to apply for tax credits and other government benefits.
She focuses on her newly started campaign to change the criminal justice system in between the five roll calls she has each day. The American Freedom Act is a seven-page handwritten bill she has drafted that she claims would alter criminal procedure in order to strengthen the presumption of innocent.
Holmes’s plan for significant reforms to the justice system “has no real chance of passing,” according to legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani. Given that she was found guilty of one of the worst frauds in American history, he makes the case that “Holmes should accept responsibility for her actions and stop trying to deflect the blame on our criminal justice system.”
Despite her adamant denial of guilt, Holmes acknowledges that “I replayed mistakes I made a million times in my mind, burning them into my body.” Holmes refuses to respond when pressed to list the specific “mistakes” she committed, stating only that “Theranos failed.” I’m accountable for that failing. Fraud is not failure.
In addition to teaching French, Holmes works as a jail law clerk, assisting women in their legal matters or obtaining compassionate release. She goes to PTSD cognitive and behavioral therapy once a week under the supervision of a physician. Additionally, she offers inmates who have experienced rape personal counseling.
“A large number of these women are single,” she says, “and once they’re in there, they’re forgotten.”
Holmes says she intends to continue advocating for the rights of defendants in the legal system after her scheduled release on April 3, 2032, and, of course, to spend as much time as possible with her family.
She claims to keep pictures of her kids and fiancé in a badge she wears around her neck, despite the fact that decorations are not permitted in her hostel. “I tape their pictures in all my books, and I lay them out in front of me as I work,” she explains. “They are what I live and fight for.”
Get the latest issue of PEOPLE, which is currently available on newsstands, for more on Elizabeth Holmes and her time behind bars.
