. “Mr Balwani turned himself in… smoothly without incident,” Jeffrey Coopersmith, Balwani’s attorney, said in an email to CNN on Thursday. “We will continue to fight for him because we do not believe that he received a fair trial.” Balwani’s arrival into custody marks an end to a years-long saga which saw him go from serving as a top executive at a high-flying Silicon Valley company to being one of the rare tech executives convicted for fraud.
The company began to unravel after a Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 reported that Theranos had only ever performed roughly a dozen of the hundreds of tests it offered using its proprietary technology, and with questionable accuracy. Balwani, nearly 20 years older than Holmes, first met her in 2002 before she dropped out of Stanford. He served as an informal adviser to Holmes in Theranos’ earliest days and the two became romantically involved.