Professor Cheryl Bader was quoted in Bloomberg Law in an article discussing Elizabeth Holmes’ defense strategy in her fraud trial.
I’ll say this much for Elizabeth Holmes: She sure knows how to play the gender game. Is there a trope of modern womanhood that the embattled founder of Theranos hasn’t deployed?
First, she was the wunderkind of tech—the girl genius who socked it to the boys in Silicon Valley with her revolutionary medical invention. She epitomized the Lean-in ethos of the era: She “sat at the table” (actually, at the head of the table) and “faked it until she made it”—taking that mantra to a whole other level.
Now, facing federal criminal charges for allegedly doing just that—faking it—Holmes has a new incarnation: victim of the patriarchy. In a recently unsealed court filing, her lawyers write that she suffered “intimate partner abuse” at the hands of her former lover and business partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.
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”She’s carefully cultivated an image of someone who’s very much at the helm, who’s self-possessed, and that [the invention]was her brain child,” says Fordham Law School professor Cheryl Bader, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in New Jersey. “She was the front person, and now the defense is saying she was controlled by a puppeteer? That’s a hard sell.”
