Jurors on Friday began deliberating the fate of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, after the prosecution and defence portrayed diametrically opposed portraits of the entrepreneur who once wowed Silicon Valley but is now accused of fraud.

Assistant US Attorney John Bostic said Holmes embraced dishonesty in an attempt to preserve the blood testing startup in the last hours of a three-month trial.

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“She committed these crimes because she was desperate for the company to succeed,” he said.

The jury went home for the evening after receiving the case on Friday. They were supposed to come back on Monday.

According to her lawyers, Holmes hoped Theranos would revolutionise medicine with small devices that could do a wide range of blood tests on a few drops from a finger prick, contending that the company’s failure was not a crime.

Holmes “chose fraud over business failure,” according to Assistant US Attorney Jeffrey Schenk, who spoke out on Thursday. The decision was “not merely cruel, but illegal.”

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Schenk attempted to debunk Holmes’ allegations that she had never willfully misled investors or patients. During a 2015 regulation inspection, he reminded jurors of a text message sent by Holmes to her former business partner and lover, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, in which she said she was “praying basically nonstop.”

She is charged with fraud on nine charges and conspiracy on two counts.

Theranos’ dizzying rise and catastrophic fall transformed Holmes from a youthful billionaire to a suspect who, if convicted, might spend years in prison.

Theranos, which was once valued at $9 billion, went bankrupt after the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles in 2015 alleging that its gadgets were faulty and incorrect.

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The evidence did not suggest Holmes was driven by a cash shortage at Theranos, according to Holmes’ attorney Kevin Downey, but rather that she believed she was “creating a technology that would alter the world.”

“You know that at the first sign of trouble, crooks cash out,” but Holmes stayed, Downey said. “She went down with that ship when it went down.”