Inside Elizabeth Holmes’ Prison Life—and How She Won Early Release

Last weekend, disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was photographed spending valuable time with the two young children who have grown up largely without her while she serves a lengthy sentence for fraud.

Exclusive Daily Mail images captured the former Silicon Valley star reuniting with her five-year-old son, William, and three-year-old daughter, Invicta, during weekend visiting hours at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas. It was more than three years after Holmes reported to prison and the cell doors closed behind her.

Those visits to the minimum-security facility, sometimes dubbed “Club Fed,” are expected to end soon. The 42-year-old has been approved to transfer to a halfway house in Austin next summer.

The new facility, in DeValle, Texas, is only a few miles from her fiancé Billy Evans’ $3.5 million South Lamar home. The move could allow Holmes to spend more time with both her children and the hotel heir.

Holmes appears to have changed little, still wearing her trademark untidy blonde hair, although she looked slightly tired. The children she left behind when she reported to prison on May 30, 2023, have changed dramatically.

Invicta was just three months old when her mother began serving her sentence and is now an engaging three-year-old. William, who was still a toddler at the time, has become a five-year-old boy.

The Daily Mail photos show 42-year-old Holmes making the most of the family reunion in the sunshine on the front lawn of the Texas prison, where visits are held.

Billy Evans, 33, typically makes the trip with the children to visit Holmes but remained at home on this occasion. The youngsters were accompanied instead by Holmes’ mother, Noel Holmes, 75, and her father, former Enron executive Christian Holmes, 80.

During a jailhouse interview last year, Holmes told People magazine that weekly visits from Billy and their children were the highlight of her week.

The new family photos emerged shortly after the official trailer for You Can See Everything, an A24 documentary by Nathan Fielder, was released on Wednesday. The film focuses on Holmes’ final weeks of freedom.

The documentary premiered at the Telluride Film Festival earlier this month and is expected to offer an unvarnished account of the month before Holmes reported to prison. During that period, she fought to avoid incarceration while preparing for the reality of being separated from her two young children.

Fielder, a comedian and filmmaker, even moved into Holmes’ home in Del Mar, California, while making the film. It promises a raw, unscripted view of those tense final days, along with unusual access to Holmes and Billy Evans.

Three years later, however, much has changed. The future Holmes imagined during those last weeks outside prison has become her daily reality.

Now known as federal prisoner number 24965-111, the convicted fraudster has only a few months remaining at Federal Prison Camp Bryan, the “Camp Fed” facility in College Station, Texas.

Holmes was originally sentenced to 11 years in prison, but her term has already been reduced by roughly half because of good behavior.

Her fellow inmates at the minimum-security women’s prison include Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted associate of Jeffrey Epstein. Former residents include Jen Shah, a star of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, who served 78 months for her role in a telemarketing fraud scheme targeting elderly victims.

Once worth billions and the toast of Silicon Valley, Holmes now looks forward to Saturday and Sunday visiting hours when she gets to spend precious time with her children and Evans, who relocated from Del Mar to a $3.5 million rental home in Austin’s swanky South Lamar neighborhood to be closer to his jailbird lover.

But the rest of the week is far less carefree with Holmes’s days starting at 6am with a prison wakeup call and a spartan breakfast comprised of two pieces of wholegrain bread with fruit jelly and margarine.

Lunch comes from the Bureau of Prisons standard menu, which is served at FPC Bryan, and ranges from plain baked fish with vegetables to hamburgers and macaroni and cheese.

Dinners, meanwhile, include simple pasta with marinara sauce, black bean soup and roast turkey with potatoes, served in the early evening before lights out at 9pm. 

Inmates are also assigned jobs and Holmes is no exception, currently earning 31 cents an hour doing double duty as a re-entry clerk and a law clerk.

In the first role, she helps fellow prisoners preparing for release with their resumes and with finding government assistance programs.

As a law clerk, she helps other inmates with their legal cases, bids for compassionate release and appeals – something to which she is no stranger, having repeatedly appealed her conviction on four counts of criminal fraud.

Last year, Holmes had yet another bid to overturn her guilty verdict shot down by a trio of judges from the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit – meaning the only hope she has of an early exit from Bryan now rests with an appeal to the Supreme Court or a presidential pardon.

She also still faces the prospect of having to pony up $452 million in restitution to the investors she is convicted of defrauding – among them, media mogul Rupert Murdoch – and is currently paying the huge sum down at the rate of $25-a-month taken from her prison earnings.

On release, the monthly payment will go up to $250, although prosecutors are currently battling for an order that would see her cough up ten percent of her earnings – no doubt with the proceeds from future tell-all books or documentaries in mind.

Holmes is currently topping up her prison earnings by teaching French to fellow inmates, but Evans – with one eye on the future – has already made moves to maximize his jailbird partner’s future funds.

Along with a cut of royalties from the new documentary, Holmes’s X account, which he has control of, briefly included a paid-for subscription feature to access some of her tweets, although that was rapidly deactivated after it made headlines it was against prison rules.

The account, which includes the tagline ‘building a better world for my two children,’ lists her as an inventor and the founder and CEO of Theranos – the once $9 billion startup that imploded after its revolutionary claims about performing scores of medical tests from tiny amounts of blood were disproven. 

Just last week, a glam photo was shared showing Holmes blowing a kiss to the camera while showing off the Taylor Swift merchandise ring that Evans used to propose to her in 2019.

The image was captioned: ‘The answer to every challenge lies in your heart.’ 

The post had reached over 12 million views as of last Monday, with many puzzled users replying directly to Holmes’s account and her apparently responding back.

The account told one X user her snake ring was ‘from a Taylor Swift merch stand,’ and when one person told her she hasn’t ‘changed at all,’ the account replied: ‘True. But I don’t think that’s the insult you meant it to be.’

When another account then asked her ‘wya’ – ‘where you at?’ – she apparently replied: ‘Bryan Federal Prison Camp.’ 

In a follow-up post, the account noted that the kissy-face photo was actually from 2019, as Holmes does not have internet access at the federal prison.

Evans, meanwhile, has been busy setting up a blood testing business of his own named Haemanthus, which is run from his rented home in Austin.

In an echo of Theranos, the company aims to provide an early detection system for multiple diseases using Raman spectroscopy and AI to scan samples of blood, urine and sweat for signs of illness.

Evans has so far raised $18.5 million-worth of investment in Haemanthus, which was launched in 2024 – and denied that Holmes would have any involvement after its existence was revealed by the New York Times last year.

On his own X page, the 33-year-old describes himself as the company’s CEO and wryly calls himself ‘babydady [sic] to Elizabeth Holmes.’

Along with political quips ‘bring back the gallows’ for treason, Evans also regularly comments on tech developments and, in one recent post, alluded to Holmes’ difficulties as well as his own in getting new tech off the ground.

‘Watching Anthropic communicate about Al risk is fascinating,’ he wrote earlier this month. ‘You can be right about something important, care about it immensely, and still communicate it so badly that everyone concludes you’re either insane, self–interested, or evil. 

‘I’ve learned this one the hard way.’

Up until the surprise screening on September 6, rumors had swirled online that filmmaker Nathan Fielder was interviewing Holmes, while the film project was kept under wraps.

Cellphones were confiscated from attendees before the documentary was screened at the Herzog Theatre for the Telluride Film Festival.

With word finally out about the tightly guarded project, an unsettling trailer was released.

In it, Fielder and Holmes are seen facing each other for roughly a minute as they discuss whether she is being genuine while staring deeply into each other’s eyes.

‘I don’t have anything to deceive you on,’ Holmes tells the director.

‘Of course I’m not deceiving you. I’m engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you? There’s no reason for me to do that.’

‘OK. All right. OK, good chat,’ Fielder replies. ‘You’re being real right now?’

‘I’m always being real,’ Holmes answers.

Her X account then reposted the trailer, adding that she is ‘always being real.’ 

In more recent years, Holmes has made pro-Trump and pro-Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) posts on X, marking a striking shift from the political views and public persona she previously projected on the platform.

Before resuming activity on X in August of 2025, Holmes’s account had been inactive since 2015. At the time, she frequently posted about prominent women including Rosa Parks, Marie Curie, Melinda Gates and Margaret Thatcher.

But by November of 2025, her account shared a Politico article about MAHA ’embracing’ her and wrote: ‘I have been working to Make America Healthy Again since 2004.’