FTX Co-Founder’s Parents Are in Danger
2023.01.03 12:39
FTX Co-Founder’s Parents Are in Danger
Budrigannews.com – Because of threats made against his family, the legal team behind former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has asked a court to redact some information about the people who are serving as sureties for his $250 million bond.
Bankman-Fried’s legal team requested that the court order “names and other identifying information” of two bail sureties not be disclosed to the public and be redacted from bonds once they were signed on Jan. 5 in a letter dated January 3 that was submitted to Judge Lewis Kaplan for the United States District Court in the Southern District of New York. Mark Cohen of the law firm Cohen & Gresser stated that if the individuals’ personal information were made public, they could be harassed in a manner comparable to that of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, the parents of the former FTX CEO.
According to Cohen, “Mr. Bankman-Fried’s parents have become the target of intense media scrutiny, harassment, and threats” over the course of the past few weeks. Mr. Bankman-Fried’s parents have also received a steady stream of threats in writing, some of which express a desire for them to be physically harmed. As a result, if the names of the two additional sureties appear unredacted on their bonds or are otherwise publicly disclosed, there is serious cause for concern that they will face similar privacy intrusions, threats, and harassment.
In December, Fried and Bankman used the equity in their Palo Alto home, where Bankman-Fried is under house arrest, to secure their son’s release on bail. Cohen cited legal precedent to support his claim that the court’s judicial power would not be hindered by the lack of public disclosure regarding others willing to financially support SBF:
“If the two remaining sureties are publicly identified, they will likely be subjected to probing media scrutiny, and potentially targeted for harassment, despite having no substantive connection to the case. Consequently, the privacy and safety of the sureties are ‘countervailing factors’ that significantly outweigh the presumption of public access to the very limited information at issue.”
Users of crypto Twitter speculated on the identities of the unidentified sureties, including hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Kevin O’Leary. One person suggested that Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao may have assisted Bankman-Fried, though this is unlikely given the disagreements the two crypto heads had on social media while FTX was insolvent.
Following his December arrest in the Bahamas, Bankman-Fried was extradited to the United States. He is expected to personally appear in court on January 3 to reportedly enter a not guilty plea to the criminal charges, which included violations of campaign finance laws, securities fraud, and wire fraud.
Bankman-Fried set to enter not guilty plea in FTX fraud case pic.twitter.com/gNFZiEpjGV
— Reuters (@Reuters) January 3, 2023
Gary Wang, a co-founder of FTX, and Caroline Ellison, a former CEO of Alameda Research, have already admitted to related charges and begun to cooperate with authorities. In December, Ellison also made a statement that acknowledged the financial ties between FTX and Alameda, which were the focus of the prosecution’s case against SBF.
More Bahamian regulator denies cooperation with FTX
