The judge ordered FTX founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, to be jailed ahead of his criminal trial, siding with federal prosecutors who argued that Bankman-Fried engaged in witness tampering and violated the terms of his bail. We'll send you a curated list of our best stories from across the web every weekend. Bankman-Fried was handcuffed and escorted out of the courtroom yesterday after the decision by the U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan. Bankman-Fried will be held until his trial on Oct. 2, according to an order issued by the federal detention center in Brooklyn.
Since December, the 31-year-old has been held in his parents' home in California, where he was extradited from the Bahamas on charges he cheated investors through his now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange.
Bankman-Fried's bail terms had been tightened in the months before the decision, but it was ultimately his contact with the media that led to his detention.
In July, he shared private diary entries of Caroline Ellison, his ex-girlfriend and the CEO of the trading firm he co-founded, with a reporter from the New York Times in his parents' home in California. Prosecutors have described the leak as an attempt at witness intimidation and described the July 20 article as the tipping point in their push to revoke Bankman-Fried's bail.
The New York Times and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argued that Bankman-Fried's detention would violate Bankman's freedom of speech.
The defense lawyers for Bankman-Friedargued that he had a First Amendment right to repair his reputation and cited that there was no gag order that prevented him from talking to the media.
The collapse of Bankman-Fried's crypto empire, once worth $32 billion, came about last fall when prosecutors alleged that FTX had misused customer deposits to cover trading losses of Alameda Research, the company's trading arm run by Ellison.
Bankman-Fried, who was removed as CEO, filed for bankruptcy in November. The FTX co-founders, Gary Wang and Ellison, have pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and are cooperating with government officials.