San Jose, California (CNN Business)Elizabeth Holmes, flushed and holding back tears, testified Monday that she left Stanford to launch Theranos in part because she had been raped, and said she later entered into what she alleged was an abusive relationship with the person who would become her startup's chief operating officer.
In an emotional moment during her fourth day on the stand in her criminal fraud trial, Holmesdisclosed her sexual assault at college and said she stopped attending classes in the aftermath. Holmes said she left to pour herself into building her company instead.
"I was questioning what — how I was going to be able to process that experience and what I wanted to do with my life, and I decided that I was going to build a life by building this company," she said.
Holmes testified that she later began a professional relationship that turned romantic with former software executive Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, who would go on to serve as COO of Theranos while they dated. She first met him in China after she graduated high school when she was 18 and he was 38. When she later disclosed to him the trauma of her rape at Stanford, she testified: "He said that I was safe, now that I had met him."
Holmes went on to paint a picture of how Balwani both coached and controlled her, criticizing everything from the tone of her voice in meetings to her being too feminine and behaving "like a little girl."
"He told me that I didn't know what I was doing in business, that my...
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