Elizabeth Holmes grilled by prosecutors on witness stand in her

Former Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes leaves the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building with her partner Billy Evans.

AMY OSBORNE/AFP via Getty Images

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AMY OSBORNE/AFP via Getty Images

Former Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes leaves the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building with her partner Billy Evans.

AMY OSBORNE/AFP via Getty Images

When Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani split, her life was shattered.

“Nothing is real any more,” Holmes told the jury in her federal fraud trial she recalled thinking back in 2016.

“My whole foundation, life, what I believed in, devotion to the company, was based on believing he was this person,” Holmes said of Balwani, her ex-boyfriend and business partner of the now-collapsed blood-testing startup Theranos.

“There was no way I could save our company if he was there,” Holmes said Tuesday. “And so, that was it.”

One day earlier, Holmes delivered emotional testimony to the court that Balwani was a manipulative partner who emotionally and sexually abused her, just as she adored and poured faith into him.

She said the abuse occurred during the time in which prosecutors allege she and Balwani lied to investors and duped patients and doctors about Theranos, which Holmes, now 37, founded as a 19 year old.

The startup was once celebrated as a biotech breakthrough and made Holmes one of the world’s youngest female billionaires before the company disintegrated in scandal.

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors had their first chance to directly question Holmes and offered another theory of the case: that Holmes was engrossed with the innerworkings of the company as chief executive when it was engaged in fraud and that her relationship with Balwani, who faces a separate trial, was more romantic than Holmes’ portrayal.

Holmes and Balwani have both pleaded not guilty.

Intimate texts create uncomfortable moments

In some of the more uncomfortable moments of the day’s testimony, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Leach made Holmes read cloying text messages with Balwani where she called him “my tiger” and Balwani wrote “I worship you.”

Holmes, welling up and sniffling as she recited the years-old messages to her onetime boyfriend, looked uneasy as Leach pressed her on the particulars of the texts.

“Would it surprise you to know that the word ‘love’ appears in the texts 594 times?” Leach asked of the trove of messages prosecutors subpoenaed as part of the…