For two years, Elizabeth Holmes has been in a Texas prison while her children — son William, 3, and daughter Invicta, 2 — are being raised nearby by their father, Holmes’s partner Billy Evans.
Critics have long accused her of using her status as a mother to avoid jail time and gain sympathy — but in her first interview from prison, Holmes insists to PEOPLE that parenthood wasn’t a ploy.
“I know how the optics look, but I always wanted to be a mother,” she says as she sits in a blue plastic chair inside Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, her home for the next 7 years. “I wanted to have children, be a mom. I truly did not think I would ever be convicted or found guilty. I kept talking to my lawyers and they also assured me we would never get this far.”
“It wasn’t planned and I can’t worry about what others think,” adds Holmes, whose children will be 10 and 9 years old when she’s slated for release in 2032. (Her sentence has been reduced by 2 years for good conduct.) “It’s just when the timing happened.”
Holmes, who dropped out of Stanford University to create Theranos at age 19, built the company to a $9 billion valuation and became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire—but her rise to fame ended in disgrace after it was revealed that her company’s much-hyped blood-testing technology produced inaccurate results.
In 2018, she and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, her onetime business and romantic partner, were indicted after misrepresenting the capabilities of their devices to investors. Both pleaded not guilty.
Holmes’s trial, which had already been delayed three times due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, was pushed back again when her legal team requested a delay due to her first pregnancy. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Leach, who was prosecuting the case, said it was “frustrating and disappointing” to learn of the delay at that point.
While eight months pregnant, Holmes attended a pretrial conference on June 15, 2021. At the time, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila said he’d provide a quiet room for Holmes and the baby she was expecting during breaks in the trial.
A month later, she welcomed her first child William — known as Wills — just weeks before her fraud trial began. Holmes had met Evans, an hotel chain heir, at a rooftop charity event in October 2017 and he proposed a year later in August 2018. Together they decided to start a family despite the legal jeopardy that Holmes was soon to face. “I asked him 20 times if he wanted to spend his life with me,” Holmes recalls. “There were a million reasons why not.”
Holmes was tried on 11 counts of fraud and found guilty of four of the charges — three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Convicted in January 2022, and with her sentencing scheduled former November, Holmes revealed that she was pregnant again with a daughter whom she would name Invicta, Latin for “invincible.”
In a letter to the sentencing judge obtained by PEOPLE, Evans spoke about how Holmes’s trial had impacted their lives and asked for a lighter sentence, saying his fiancée would miss out on milestone moments. “My heart is broken with the thought of spending any days away from Liz, for a future in which my son grows up with a relationship with his mother on the other side of glass armed by guards,” the letter read. “The gravity of time without her is hard for me to comprehend.”
Holmes’ defense team cited her “two very young children” in its argument in Feb. 2023 for why she was not a flight risk and should remain out of prison while she appealed her fraud conviction, which was denied. She was scheduled to begin serving her sentence on April 27, 2023, but it was pushed back a month when she gave birth to her daughter.
When Holmes was finally driven up to the prison gates in a Ford Expedition in May, she was using a high-tech breast pump to collect milk for then-3-month-old Ivy. Upon surrendering, she explained to guards that she was still breastfeeding her daughter and was then allowed to have two pumps with her. “I wanted my daughter to have her mother’s milk,” she says. ” It was important to me because it was a way to love her in here.”
Looking back, Holmes says, “I received a considerable amount of time I wasn’t expecting. I always wanted a big family, Billy wanted even more kids. It was such a beautiful experience in such a horrible time,” she adds.
“It pains me that I am behind bars and I’m not there for all the moments that matter in their life. People can think what they’d like about me, but it just happened and it’s the happiest moments in my life. I love them.”