US prosecutors accused FTX co-founder Samuel Bankman-Fried of providing the press with the writings of his ex-girlfriend to discredit her as a potential witness at his criminal fraud trial.
The writings were penned by Alameda Research LLC former Chief Executive Officer Caroline Ellison, who pleaded guilty last year to fraud charges in the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in their case against Bankman-Fried.
The New York Times published a story Thursday that it said was based on her writings in Google Docs and in personal journals. The excerpts appeared to reveal Ellison’s ambivalence about her role at FTX and relationship with Bankman-Fried.
“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,” prosecutors wrote in a letter to US District Judge Lewis Kaplan.
The government said the documents excerpted in the article do not appear to have come from materials provided to Bankman-Fried in pretrial information sharing and probably came instead from his personal Google Drive account.
Bankman-Fried’s aim is to cast Ellison as a “jilted lover who perpetrated” the alleged FTX crimes on her own, prosecutors said. “While the government expects the overwhelming evidence to give the lie to this defense, it is prejudicial and improper for the defendant to malign Ellison’s credibility in advance of trial, particularly with materials that the defense has not established are admissible at trial, much less produced to the government.”
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The prosecutors asked the judge to issue an order limiting “extrajudicial statements by parties and witnesses likely to interfere with a fair trial by an impartial jury.”
Attorneys for Bankman-Fried didn’t immediately respond outside regular business hours to a request for comment.
