Sam Bankman-Fried spent 2021 and much of 2022 talking himself into the role of a cryptocurrency mogul. A court hearing today will decide whether he has now talked himself from cushy house arrest back into a concrete and steel jail cell.
The immediate trigger for today’s hearing in the courtroom of District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan was Bankman-Fried’s sharing of the private diary of Caroline Ellison, who Bankman-Fried installed as nominal CEO of FTX and later allegedly ordered to engage in fraud. Prosecutors claim the goal of the leak was to discredit or intimidate Ellison ahead of the trial, when she is expected to testify as a cooperating witness.
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But this is merely the straw that broke the camel’s back: Sam Bankman-Fried has been using deceptive public arguments and back-door private communications to manipulate his trial since the moment of FTX’s collapse.
He gave seemingly innumerable interviews and public appearances in the weeks before his arrest. During his house arrest, he has continued to give interviews proclaiming his innocence, though lower-profile. Well before releasing Ellison’s diary, he also allegedly reached out to many of those expected to testify against him.
A Tower of Babble
The public statements, at least, would seem fair enough in a nation underpinned by the principle of free speech. But Bankman-Fried has, not to put too fine a point on it, repeatedly lied in his public statements about what happened. At least from the outside, this has created the appearance of a sustained campaign aimed at poisoning the entire pool of potential jurors with a false narrative — though the view from within Bankman-Fried’s own head is probably a bit rosier.
Far more alarming, though, have been prosecutors’ claims that Bankman-Fried had communicated with former colleagues at Alameda and FTX after his arrest. Given that basically every member of his inner circle has entered a plea deal and agreed to testify against him, a court could reasonably interpret this as witness tampering — an attempt to get them to change their story, whether through intimidation, persuasion or further deception.
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