Sam Bankman-Fried Might Have Leaked Caroline’s Diary, But Lawyers Say ‘He’s Done Nothing Wrong’

Attorneys representing Sam Bankman-Fried affirm that he talked to and shared paperwork with The New York Occasions for a narrative about Caroline Ellison final week, however insist “he is accomplished nothing fallacious.”

Ellison, his former lover and one-time CEO of Alameda Analysis, was the topic of an in-depth article within the Grey Girl final week.

U.S. prosecutors subsequently claimed that Bankman-Fried, who’s going through prison expenses from his ill-fated stint as CEO of FTX, had shared the diary entries with the press in an try to “discredit” Ellison—and requested a choose to stop him from making statements that would probably intrude with a good trial.

However in a letter to Choose Lewis A. Kaplan over the weekend, Bankman-Fried’s attorneys accused the federal government of misconstruing an incident “the place nothing improper or impermissible occurred.”

The July 22 message from Cohen & Gressler LLP denies that Bankman-Fried sought to discredit Ellison and taint the jury pool—and as an alternative, argued that the FTX founder was giving a proper of reply to an article that had been within the works for months.

“Mr. Bankman-Fried didn’t violate the protecting order on this case, nor did he violate his bail circumstances, nor did he violate any legislation or rule governing his conduct,” the letter mentioned. “Slightly, Mr. Bankman-Fried was exercising his rights underneath the First and Sixth Amendments to answer an inquiry from the media.”

The NYT revealed that Elliosn had been “feeling fairly sad and overwhelmed” along with her position main the buying and selling agency, which was the sister firm of the doomed FTX alternate. Her diary entries went on to confess that she did not really feel “nicely suited” to the position—and struggled in areas corresponding to “management” and “decisiveness.”

Ellison additionally allegedly wrote “it feels nice” on the day FTX collapsed, a day that left tens of millions of shoppers locked out of their funds and despatched the crypto markets right into a tailspin.

The attorneys went on to argue that Ellison was depicted sympathetically gentle within the Occasions article, whereas Bankman-Fried was not—and went on to assault FTX’s new CEO, John J. Ray III, for “routinely and gratuitously attacking” his predecessor.

“Mr. Bankman Fried, who has asserted his innocence regardless of these public assaults, has a proper to counter that public narrative by making truthful remark within the media,” Mark S. Cohen and Christian R. Everdell wrote.

The crux of Bankman-Fried’s argument is that this: Ray and FTX’s new administration have additionally made inflammatory remarks about him in latest months, however the authorities “stood silent”—even when he was accused of being a villain, a liar, and pushed by “hubris, incompetence and greed.”

His authorized workforce went on to emphasize that no bail circumstances had been damaged when Bankman-Fried invited a Occasions reporter to his dad and mom’ dwelling in Palo Alto, California, the place he’s underneath home arrest.

“This go to was removed from secret,” they wrote. “Mr. Bankman-Fried adopted all circumstances and procedures underneath the bail circumstances for receiving guests, together with having a safety guard display screen the reporter for prohibited digital gadgets and coming into the reporter’s title on the customer log.”

The letter goes on to emphasize that the paperwork the FTX founder confirmed to the journalist weren’t produced within the discovery course of—”as the federal government concedes”—however stops in need of saying what they had been.

And Bankman-Fried’s attorneys firmly denied any suggestion that he had tried to harass, discredit or forged Ellison in a unfavourable gentle.

“Mr. Bankman-Fried didn’t hunt down The New York Occasions,” the attorneys wrote. “The reporter approached our shopper for touch upon a narrative in progress. The story implicated Mr. Bankman-Fried as a lot because it did Ms. Ellison, and our shopper agreed to offer his perspective.”

Bankman-Fried has now agreed to keep away from making statements that may intrude with the suitable to a good trial by an neutral jury—on the situation that every one events and witnesses within the case additionally comply.