US prosecutors have accused FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried of witness tampering and requested a federal choose to subject an order that might bar the previous billionaire and different events from making public statements prone to intervene with a good trial.
The prosecutors wrote to US District Judge Lewis Kaplan on Thursday referencing a New York Times article titled “Inside the Private Writings of Caroline Ellison, Star Witness in the FTX Case”.
The article reported excerpts from Ellison’s private Google paperwork from earlier than the collapse of FTX through which she spoke about being “pretty unhappy and overwhelmed” along with her job and feeling “hurt/rejected” from her breakup with Bankman-Fried.
Ellison led Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research hedge fund and has pleaded responsible to defrauding traders and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. In December, Bankman-Fried stated he and Ellison had been in a relationship however gave no additional particulars.
Prosecutors stated it was obvious Bankman-Fried shared paperwork with the New York Times and that his attorneys have since confirmed to the federal government that he met with one of many article’s authors in individual and shared paperwork “that were not part of the government’s discovery material.”
Bankman-Fried’s spokesperson and attorneys didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark. The New York Times declined to remark, and Ellison’s attorneys didn’t reply to a Reuters request for remark.
The prosecutors argued that by sharing these paperwork, Bankman-Fried was attempting to malign Ellison’s credibility, and that such conduct might chill witnesses from testifying and taint the jury pool.
“By selectively sharing certain private documents with the New York Times, the defendant is attempting to discredit a witness, cast Ellison in a poor light, and advance his defense through the press and outside the constraints of the courtroom and rules of evidence: that Ellison was a jilted lover who perpetrated these crimes alone”, prosecutors wrote within the letter.
Earlier on Thursday, FTX Trading sued founder Bankman-Fried and different former executives of the cryptocurrency trade, searching for to recoup greater than $1 billion (practically Rs. 88,200 crore) they allegedly misappropriated earlier than FTX went bankrupt.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
