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The judge presiding over the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried on Thursday denied yet another motion asking for the pretrial release of the onetime CEO of FTX, a crypto exchange once valued at $32 billion that imploded in November.
On Tuesday, Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell had asked Lewis Kaplan to let Bankman-Fried spend the trial outside of the Metropolitan Detention Center, the notorious Brooklyn prison where Bankman-Fried has spent the last month and a half in a cell after his bail was revoked in August.
Kaplan rebuffed their request, simply scrawling on their motion that it was “[d]enied for reasons stated on record this date.”
Kaplan’s denial likely puts an end to a weeks-long crusade Bankman-Fried’s attorneys have waged on behalf of their client as they approach what promises to be one of the most scrutinized trials of the decade.
After the Justice Department charged Bankman-Fried with fraud in December, the FTX cofounder put up a $250 million bail, secured by his parents and friends of the family at Stanford, and spent seven months at his parents’ home in Palo Alto as he prepared for trial.
His ability to stay at his parents’ home came with numerous stipulations, and Bankman-Fried, according to the prosecution, repeatedly flouted the conditions of his release.
In January, he allegedly texted a former FTX counsel on Signal, an encrypted message app, and said he’d “really love to reconnect and see if there’s a way for us to have a constructive relationship, use each other as resources when possible, or at least vet things with each other.”
Then, in February, he used a VPN, or virtual private network, to stream the Super Bowl and obscure his internet browsing. Kaplan reprimanded him and ordered him to stop logging into a VPN.
And in July, the New York Times published a story on Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, the crypto hedge fund attached at the hip to FTX. The article was based on pages of Ellison’s diary entries, and the lawyers for the government alleged that Bankman-Fried leaked the documents to the Times reporter. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers did not deny the allegations, and in August, the Justice Department convinced Kaplan to revoke SBF’s bail on the basis of witness tampering.
Since then, his lawyers have repeatedly plied both Kaplan and an appeals court for Bankman-Fried’s pretrial release, citing the conditions of the jail and their client’s inability to effectively prepare for trial, among other reasons.
Kaplan and the panel of three judges have not been persuaded.
