Inside the Courtroom With Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Three days a week, Adriana Kratzmann, an administrator, opens the door at 8:30 a.m. to Courtroom 4 of the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse.

Journalists and spectators present her with numbered paper tickets that they get from security guards at the building entrance. Once Ms. Kratzmann checks their tickets, they stream into the beige-walled room, jostling for a place on five long wooden benches and a single, prized row of cushioned chairs.

Then from a door on the east side of the windowless room, Elizabeth Holmes walks in.

Only a select few have made it inside the San Jose courtroom where Ms. Holmes, the disgraced founder of the failed blood-testing start-up Theranos, is being tried on 12 counts of fraud, charged with misleading investors about her company’s technology. Just 34 seats are open for the public, and when those are filled, spectators are directed to an overflow room one floor down, where around 50 people squeeze in to watch the trial on large monitors.

The matters being discussed at the trial are substantial. The fate of the 37-year-old Ms. Holmes — one of the most infamous entrepreneurs of her generation — is on the line in a case that has come to symbolize Silicon Valley’s hubris. Media coverage has been plentiful.

But what the public can’t see are the dozens of small interactions that happen behind the courthouse’s closed doors: Ms. Holmes whispering through her mask to her lawyers; the jury of eight men and four women scribbling notes in large white binders; the packs of lawyers whizzing past reporters who camp out on the hallway’s carpeted floors during breaks, charging their laptops. That hallway often goes quiet when Ms. Holmes, who has a special quiet room but uses the same elevator, bathroom and entry as everyone else, walks by.

To the affable security guards and other courtroom veterans, it’s no different from any other day at work. Courtroom 4 has seen its share of trials since the Robert F. Peckham Building, later named after a federal judge, was completed in 1984.

“There’s nothing really remarkable about it,” said Vicki Behringer, 61, one of two court artists in the room, who has sketched trials in Northern California for 31 years.

Six weeks in, Ms. Holmes’s trial has settled into a rhythm. As members of the public take their seats in the fifth-floor courtroom, lawyers for the prosecution and defense come in from the same door as Ms. Holmes. They confer among themselves and set binders down on wooden tables. Ringing the courtroom are framed vintage-style posters from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.

Then the crowd stands as Judge Edward J. Davila of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California enters. He presides from an elevated bench, separated from everybody by a pandemic-era clear divider.

Before the jury comes in, lawyers for each side spar over what evidence can be presented and what questions can be asked. Judge Davila,…