Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the now-defunct FTX crypto exchange, had his bail revoked on Friday ahead of his October trial, according to US District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan.
The verdict followed charges that Bankman-Fried disclosed Caroline Ellison’s journal to the New York Times, the former CEO of FTX’s investment arm Alameda Research. On Friday afternoon, Kaplan announced his ruling in a federal court in Manhattan.
Bankman-Fried is facing allegations from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, including defrauding FTX investors. Earlier this year, he pleaded not guilty to criminal charges in the United States.
Initially, Bankman-Fried had requested access to Google Drive, claiming it was for discovery, according to Inner City Press, citing Assistant US Attorney Danielle Sassoon’s remarks at the hearing on Friday. “Then he used it to give Ms. Ellison’s documents to the New York Times.”
Six days after the New York Times piece on Ellison’s diary was published, Kaplan barred Bankman-Fried from speaking publicly about his case in a July 26 hearing.
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He was previously under house arrest at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, Calif., on a $250 million bond since his arrest in December 2022, but is now facing consequences for allegedly intimidating witnesses like Ellison.
The federal judge ruled that a gag order was insufficient in light of Bankman-Fried’s frequent transgressions of “a line.”
During the hearing, Kaplan stated that there is a “possibility that he will be detained at [The Metropolitan Detention Center], which is not on anyone’s list of five-star facilities.” Bankman-Fried, on the other hand, may be able to use a “dedicated laptop” at the Brooklyn, New York, jail for nine to eleven hours per day.
Ellison and former FTX co-founder Gary Wang pleaded guilty to various offenses in late December and accepted plea deals that offered shorter sentences in exchange for cooperating with US investigators.
