As ordered by a San Jose court, disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes must report to prison in Texas by this Thursday, April 27, in order to begin serving an 11-year sentence, after being found guilty of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud last summer. Her company, of course, crashed and burned when it was discovered that her miraculous one-drop-of-blood tests didn’t work at all.
A hard prison-time deadline would rattle most people, but Holmes appeared unbothered in new paparazzi photographs published by the Daily Mail Tuesday in which she’s grinning and flanked by her fiancé, hotel heir Billy Evans, and clutching her infant daughter.
Holmes gave birth to her second child with Evans only three months ago, and according to the Daily Mail, which is claiming to have acquired the child’s birth certificate, the would-be Silicon Valley scion christened the baby girl Invicta, which is a feminized take on the Latin word meaning “unconquered.”
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“What’s the opposite of remorse? Yeah that,” Bijan Salehizadeh, an investor at Highland Capital Partners who passed on investing in Theranos in 2006 when Holmes couldn’t answer his questions, tweeted Tuesday. “Naming a kid after a poem that political and war prisoners often cite is precious. The demons of denial are raging. Minimum security prison camp with Jen Shah of RH sadly won’t fix that.”
If the Mail indeed isn’t bullshitting, for Holmes to have named her own daughter after her personal defiance in the face of her now-inevitable imprisonment is about as acute a display of narcissism as one’s ever likely to see.
The context of Invicta’s naming is especially chilling when you consider the fact that in January, prosecutors said they learned that Holmes had purchased a one-way ticket to Mexico, and that “only after the government raised this unauthorized flight with defense counsel was the trip canceled.” Yeah: heavily pregnant, she allegedly tried to flee.
If the certificate’s real, Holmes gave birth Feb. 9, and the poor kid may be nothing more than a prop meant to make a psychopath look slightly more doting. What a shame, because Invicta Holmes Evans is kind of a killer name. Hope she enjoys therapy.
And maybe one day, little Invicta can find a kindred spirit in Titan Invictus, the young daughter of one of the “‘elite’ couples breeding to save mankind.”
