Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes’ Prison Life Revealed by Former Jail Friend

For Carissa Pollard, a 21-month prison sentence for defrauding a local nonprofit theater and failing to file tax returns felt, at first, like the end of her life as she knew it.

The mother of two from Cheyenne, Wyoming, was convicted in June 2023 and sent to Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a minimum-security facility in eastern Texas, to serve her sentence.

Two months before Pollard arrived, another high-profile fraud defendant had surrendered at the same prison. Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, was serving an 11-year sentence after being found guilty of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

The Daily Mail can now reveal the story of the women’s unexpected friendship, forged as they navigated the vulnerability of starting prison life, as well as Pollard’s account of Holmes’ day-to-day existence behind bars.

“Dropping somebody in a foreign country is what going to prison is like. You have to find somebody in prison who is willing to teach you the ropes and explain how things work. She was one of those people who did that for me,” Pollard, 49, said of Holmes in an exclusive interview.

“I had absolutely no idea what to expect when I went to Bryan,” Pollard said.

“I didn’t even know where Bryan, Texas, was before I was sentenced. I had spent very little time outside Wyoming, so it was definitely a culture shock for me.

“I had no experience with the judicial system or the prison system — any of it. I had no clue what I was walking into.”

Pollard said she was grateful to have met Holmes, 42, and that the two women connected over their struggles with diet and fitness.

“Elizabeth helped everybody,” Pollard said of Holmes, who has returned to the headlines following the release of the hit documentary You Can See Everything. The film follows Holmes during the month before she surrendered to prison authorities on May 30, 2023.

The documentary also focuses on Holmes’ partner, Billy Evans, who was left to raise their two children, William, five, and Invicta, three, on his own.

Evans, 34, has since moved from Southern California to Austin, Texas, so he can be closer to Holmes. He and the children visit her most weekends.

Although the collapse of Theranos and Holmes’ fraud trial and conviction drew worldwide attention, Pollard said she knew little about the case when she arrived at Federal Prison Camp Bryan.

“Obviously, I had heard her name and the name Theranos because they came up in some of the media I follow every day. But I didn’t know much about the details of the case or about her personally,” Pollard said.

“I only knew what she had been charged with, and that was pretty much it.”

Life at Bryan is stark. Women sleep four to a room, guards wake them at 5 a.m., and they spend their days working jobs that pay just seven to nine cents an hour.

Lights-out is at 8.30pm, and meals consist of burgers, chicken pieces and other basic fare cooked by lags and taken from the Bureau of Prisons standard menu.

Unlike sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, 64, who is also serving her time at Bryan, Holmes has proven popular with fellow prisoners and guards alike due to her politeness and willingness to help – with Pollard telling the Daily Mail that the mom-of-two keeps her head down and has never traded on her fame to get special treatment.

But Holmes, Pollard said, has stuck her neck out for other prisoners, helping them prepare for life on the outside. 

Unhappy with the prison diet, she’s asked guards to provide fresh fruit with breakfast.

Pollard says she, too, struggled with the food provided in the prison’s ‘chow hall’ and met Holmes when she approached Pollard at the prison’s education center, where Holmes works, and asked for help navigating the commissary list.

‘Elizabeth was nursing one of her infant children when I got there so she was obviously having to supplement her diet to continue to nurse,’ Pollard recalled.

‘When you’re new in prison, you don’t know how things work. I hadn’t really experienced the whole commissary situation before, so I was looking at this piece of paper with a list of stuff on it, and we were comparing what she felt was a good buy from a nutritional basis…because you just don’t know.’

From there, the pair bonded over being mothers parted from their children – Pollard has a 21-year-old daughter and a 22-year-old son – and began increasingly spending more time together, jogging and having long conversations about life.

‘Her and I had very similar backgrounds in that we both had spouses and children and families at home,’ Pollard said.

‘We had similar interests, similar likes, and we just kind of bonded. It was an incredibly vulnerable time for both of us, and we just developed a friendship from those traumas.’

As for Holmes being away from her very young children, Pollard added: ‘It’s excruciating. I commend her family for bringing her children to her every single weekend.

‘I think that’s an honorable thing to do. I can’t imagine what she was going through internally, not being around her children. Being there as a mother, it’s horrible.

‘My daughter was a senior in high school when I was incarcerated. I just think of all of the things that I missed, and it’s devastating.’

The pair also bonded over fitness, with Pollard telling the Daily Mail: ‘We did a lot of jogging, working out, some yoga.

‘There’s been this perception in the media that we had these organized workouts like a gym would have, and that’s not necessarily the truth.

‘We had an outdoor recreation center and we had an indoor recreation center, and the outdoor recreation center was a track and then kind of an open-air gazebo thing with a couple basketball courts and some weights.’

Pollard also recalled how Holmes became trusted and well-liked by other prisoners because ‘she was known to be that person in education that would help you with whatever situation or skill that you needed help with.’

And, even though Holmes comes from a life of privilege – the San Diego home featured in You Can See Everything has been valued at $9 million – prison is the great equalizer.

‘Now, there were some people that thought they were maybe a little bit better than the next. But, as a whole, we were all there doing the same time, missing our family, eating the same crap food, waking up every day to an episode of Groundhog’s Day,’ Pollard said.

‘That’s just the facts of it. Nobody has anything to gain in prison by who they are. If you were a celebrity before you came in, I can promise you nobody cares when you go in. We wear the same clothes. There’s no hierarchy in the prison that I was in.’

Although Pollard hasn’t been able to speak to Holmes since being released from Bryan in January 2024, she says she hopes to once the former Silicon Valley darling is released. 

‘Elizabeth is one of the kindest, most respectful, compassionate individuals that I think I’ve ever met,’ Pollard said.

‘She consistently treated the staff and the inmates with politeness, with dignity. And she carried herself with integrity.

‘She was obedient to the rules and the expectations. She was polite to everybody and she just conducted herself in a positive manner.’ 

Pollard added: ‘We’re all fighting different battles being in this institution, and she chose to wake up every day with a positive intent to do her very best to help who she could in that facility that we were in.

‘And I commend her for that, because a lot of people didn’t do that. You could read all day, you could crochet all day, you could sleep all day.

‘I mean, there’s a multitude of things that you could do to waste a day in prison, and she chose to get up and exercise and be positive and present herself in a positive light.’

Holmes is scheduled to be sent to a halfway house in Austin in August 2027 where she will see out the rest of her sentence, which is set to end in 2030.

Once released, she will be liable for her share of the $452 million restitution order against her and former Theranos business partner Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani, which she is already paying towards from the pittance she makes in prison.

Pollard, who is now working again and gradually repaying the money that she stole, said she has yet to see the new documentary – and won’t until she’s spoken to Holmes about how she feels about it.

But Pollard said she is appalled at the backlash and cruel memes about her friend.

‘Until I can speak to Elizabeth about her feelings of the documentary, I won’t watch it. If Billy and Elizabeth say, “You know what? Watch it. We love it. We are on board” – great, I’ll watch it.

‘But until I can get that validation, I avoid all of it because to me, it’s just noise. It’s just noise.

‘There’s a lot of people and a lot of content out there right now that are speaking about Elizabeth that have never met her a day in their life, let alone live with her. And I just find that unfair.’