SAN JOSE, Calif. — At the top of her acclaim in 2015, Elizabeth Holmes, the entrepreneur who based the blood testing start-up Theranos, was named Glamour’s “Woman of the Year.” Time put her on its record of 100 luminaries. And she graced the covers of Fortune, Forbes, Inc. and T Magazine.

Theranos collapsed in scandal three years later, failing in its mission to revolutionize the well being care trade. But it did change the world in one other method: It helped bitter the media on Silicon Valley.

That level was introduced dwelling on Thursday when Roger Parloff, a journalist who penned the Fortune cowl story on Ms. Holmes and Theranos in 2014, testified in a federal courtroom in San Jose, Calif., the place Ms. Holmes is on trial for 12 counts of fraud. Mr. Parloff mentioned Ms. Holmes had made misrepresentations to him, together with the quantity and varieties of checks that Theranos might do, in addition to its work with the army and pharmaceutical corporations.

Theranos’s legislation agency, Boies Schiller, had launched him to the start-up, Mr. Parloff mentioned. The legislation agency had instructed him that “the real story was this remarkable company and its remarkable founder and C.E.O., Elizabeth Holmes,” he testified, trying straight at Ms. Holmes throughout the courtroom.

The discovery that Ms. Holmes, the tech trade’s most celebrated feminine entrepreneur, was misdirecting the world about her firm marked a turning level in the tech press, ending a decade-long run of largely optimistic protection. Reporters cringed over glowing articles that they had written about tech corporations that turned out to have stretched the reality, glossed over the damaging penalties of their merchandise or usually abused the belief that they had loved with the public.

“Holmes just becomes this fable of ‘You can’t just buy what they’re selling,’” mentioned Margaret O’Mara, a professor at the University of Washington and a historian of Silicon Valley. “‘This was not what it purported to be, and we fell for it.’”

After The Wall Street Journal published exposés in 2015 and 2016 exhibiting that Theranos was not what it seemed to be, protection of tech corporations usually turned extra probing.

Reporters dug into Facebook’s role in the 2016 presidential election, in addition to scandals at Uber and a sequence of #MeToo accusations and labor uprisings at tech corporations. The shift occurred alongside the realization that the tech trade was not the area of interest realm of idealist laptop geeks. It had turn out to be the dominant power in the international financial system and wanted to be held extra to account.

Now as Ms. Holmes, 37, stands trial, the media’s function in Theranos’s rise and fall has been specified by painstaking element. Ms. Holmes used optimistic articles like Fortune’s to gain credibility with investors, who poured $945 million into Theranos, prosecutors have argued.

Those traders had been typically wowed by the media protection. Chris Lucas, a enterprise capitalist whose agency had invested in Theranos, testified that studying the Fortune article had made him “very proud of the situation, proud we were involved, very proud of Elizabeth, the whole thing.” Lisa Peterson, who managed a $100 million funding in Theranos on behalf of the rich DeVos household, lifted language straight from the Fortune article right into a report she ready.

The media was likewise desirous to embrace Ms. Holmes’s narrative of an excellent Stanford University dropout on her strategy to changing into the subsequent Steve Jobs. Here was a younger, self-made feminine billionaire who was being compared to Einstein and Beethoven. She embraced iconography, dressing like Mr. Jobs in black turtlenecks, in addition to an esoteric way of life, telling Mr. Parloff that she was a vegan Buddhist who eschewed espresso for inexperienced juice.

“There was a hunger for that kind of story, and she seized that opportunity and worked that very carefully,” Ms. O’Mara mentioned.

The media’s fascination with Ms. Holmes turned so intense that in 2015, her enterprise associate and boyfriend at the time, Ramesh Balwani, who is called Sunny, warned her that the hype was getting dangerous.

“FYI, I am worried about over exposure without solid substance, which is lacking right now,” Mr. Balwani wrote in a textual content message that was included in courtroom filings.

Ms. Holmes disregarded the warning. Media protection had helped Theranos with an obvious potential enterprise deal, she wrote, including, “The more it works the more haters will hate.”

Later that 12 months, The Journal revealed that Theranos’s know-how didn’t do what the start-up claimed, spurring a shock inspection by regulators that led to the firm’s unraveling.

Theranos forcefully denied The Journal’s report. On CNBC, Ms. Holmes dismissed the article as “what happens when you work to change things.” She and Mr. Balwani plotted a defamation go well with, in accordance with textual content messages included in courtroom filings. Together, they led Theranos staff in chanting an expletive at John Carreyrou, The Journal’s reporter.

Soon after, Mr. Parloff printed a long correction to his Fortune article outlining the methods Theranos and Ms. Holmes had misled him. He additionally blamed himself for not together with a few of Ms. Holmes’s extra evasive and opaque solutions to his questions.

In courtroom, displays revealed that Ms. Holmes had proven Mr. Parloff the identical falsified validation reviews — which appeared to indicate that pharmaceutical corporations had endorsed Theranos’s know-how after they had not — that she had despatched to traders. Mr. Parloff additionally mentioned Ms. Holmes had instructed him that the army was utilizing Theranos in Afghanistan, however that the truth was so delicate he couldn’t publish it and even ask Gen. James Mattis, a Theranos board member, about it. It turned out that Theranos machines had been by no means used on battlefields.

“She was very concerned about trade secrets,” Mr. Parloff mentioned.

Other retailers that had hailed Ms. Holmes adopted Mr. Parloff’s mea culpa. Forbes revised Ms. Holmes’s internet price, as soon as estimated at $4.5 billion, to zero. Glamour appended an update to its Woman of the Year award after the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Ms. Holmes with fraud.

Even as she faces as much as 20 years in jail if convicted, Ms. Holmes continues to struggle the media. Throughout the trial, her legal professionals have pushed to restrict Mr. Parloff’s testimony. They filed a movement to compel him to show over all of his reporting notes, although he had already supplied recordings of his interviews with Ms. Holmes to each side of the case underneath subpoena.

The purpose of that movement was to indicate that Mr. Parloff “was colored by bias” and “a desire to blame any errors he made in his initial article on Ms. Holmes,” John Cline, a lawyer for Ms. Holmes, mentioned in a listening to in October.

A decide denied the movement as a “fishing expedition.”