Prosecutors ask to send Sam Bankman-Fried to jail for witness tampering by sharing Caroline Ellison's diary entries with journalist
Amr Alfiky/Reuters.
- Prosecutors want to send Sam Bankman-Fried to jail over alleged witness tampering.
- The development followed recent reports around Caroline Ellison's Google Doc entries.
- Bankman-Fried's lawyers had said they'd agree to a gag order, but that leaking the entries was fine.
Prosecutors asked a federal judge Wednesday to send Sam Bankman-Fried to jail over alleged witness tampering.
"No set of release conditions can ensure the safety of the community," Assistant US Attorney Danielle Sassoon said.
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan will review additional filings in the case over the next week before deciding.
Wednesday's hearing followed controversy around newly surfaced Google Doc entries of Caroline Ellison, a former co-CEO of Bankman-Fried's trading firm Alameda Research, who'd had a fitful relationship with the FTX founder.
Ellison's Google Docs, which she wrote in last year, had depicted her weariness and angst working with Bankman-Fried amid their periodic relationship, the New York times reported earlier this month.
In those entries, Ellison revealed feeling self-conscious in Bankman-Fried's presence, and described her "instinct to shrink and become smaller and quieter and defer to others," according to the New York Times.
After that report, federal prosecutors in Manhattan told the court that it was Bankman-Fried who leaked the entries in order to undermine Ellison as she prepares to testify against him in a criminal trial against him scheduled for October.
"He provided documents not in the public record that the court did not a deem admissible at trial that, in the government's view, were meant to embarrass ms Ellison," Sassoon said Wednesday.
In their filing this month, prosecutors asked the court to limit what figures involved in the case can say outside of court proceedings, characterizing Bankman-Fried's recent actions as an "attempt to interfere with a fair trial by an impartial jury."
In response, Bankman-Fried's defense team said they would accept a gag order to rein in what their client could say before the trial, but argued that Bankman-Fried was within his bounds to share Ellison's entries with a journalist.
Besides, they said, it just made him look bad anyway.
Ellison pleaded guilty in December to charges including conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, part of a deal to cooperate in the criminal investigation.
Lawyers for Bankman-Fried and Ellison declined to comment.