SBF’s ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison takes the stand as government’s star witness

Caroline Ellison, the federal government’s star witness in its legal case towards the disgraced former CEO of bankrupt crypto change FTX, is predicted to take the stand on Tuesday, because the legal trial of Sam Bankman-Fried resumes in a downtown Manhattan courthouse.

Ellison, who ran FTX’s sister hedge fund Alameda Research, pleaded responsible in December to 2 counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit cash laundering.

Part of Ellison’s plea cope with the federal government has concerned cooperating with the prosecution’s case towards Bankman-Fried, just like the association struck with Gary Wang — the lesser-known co-founder of FTX and Alameda, whose cross-examination picks up at 9:30 a.m.

Ellison presents a novel view of the defendant, having been one of many firm’s earliest recruits in 2017. Bankman-Fried had reportedly satisfied the Stanford grad to ditch her Wall Street buying and selling job at Jane Capital to affix Alameda as a dealer, again when the hedge fund was nonetheless in its authentic workplace within the San Francisco Bay space. Ellison additionally spent years as Bankman-Fried’s on-again, off-again girlfriend and, at instances, his roommate.

U.S. Attorney Thane Rehn teed up Ellison’s potential testimony in his opening assertion to the jury final week, saying that Bankman-Fried “was using her as a front” when “in reality, he was still calling the shots at Alameda.”

Rehn went on to allege in his opening that it was Bankman-Fried who had concocted a “scheme to take money from FTX and give it to Alameda” and that Ellison would share the main points of how she and her former lover stole buyer cash from FTX and deployed that money by Alameda.

Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried’s lead protection legal professional Mark Cohen spun a far completely different narrative in his opening remarks in courtroom, casting Ellison as a frontrunner who held agency management over the agency and whose management in the end ran the corporate into the bottom.

In Cohen’s recounting of occasions, Bankman-Fried had urged his former deputy at Alameda to “put on a hedge,” however “she didn’t do so at the time.”

Noticeably absent up to now in proceedings is the point out of Ellison’s co-CEO Sam Trabucco, who was a classmate of Bankman-Fried at MIT. Trabucco left Alameda in Aug. 2022 and has stayed comparatively underneath the radar.

For months, the 28-year-old has been the topic of mass hypothesis, as her non-public writings and public posts have been scrutinized by the press — and by legal attorneys.

Ellison has tweeted about “regular amphetamine use,” reportedly journaled on Tumblr about her personal exploration into polyamory, and in Michael Lewis’s new e book concerning the rise and fall of Bankman-Fried, intensive business-like memos written by Ellison to Bankman-Fried shed new gentle on their beleaguered romance.

“Caroline sensed that, even as Sam promoted her to CEO of Alameda Research, he disapproved of her job performance — and she shared his opinion,” Lewis wrote in his e book.

Lewis went on to share an excerpt from one of many memos that Ellison had despatched to her boss and boyfriend: “It feels like I’m doing a much worse job managing Alameda than you would if you were working on it full-time,” she wrote. “I’m going to fuck up important things if you don’t step in sometimes,” continued the excerpt from Ellison’s memo shared in Lewis’s e book.

The former Alameda exec had adopted Bankman-Fried from California, to Hong Kong, and in the end, to the Bahamas, as Bankman-Fried repeatedly shifted headquarters for his crypto firms. Lewis’s reporting contains hypothesis that Bankman-Fried’s departures from every metropolis coincided with relationship troubles with Ellison.

In July, the New York Times printed a report with non-public diary entries of Ellison leaked to the publication by Bankman-Fried, an act which in the end landed him again in jail after Judge Lewis Kaplan revoked his bail for alleged witness tampering.

In a Google doc from Feb. 2022 shared with the Times, Ellison wrote, “I have been feeling pretty unhappy and overwhelmed with my job…At the end of the day I can’t wait to go home and turn off my phone and have a drink and get away from it all.”

She added, “It doesn’t really feel like there’s an end in sight.”

Ellison’s insecurities each relating to her relationship with Bankman-Fried and in her position as the highest chief at Alameda are chronicled extensively in Lewis’s reporting and within the leaked diary entries.

Court filings present that Ellison’s compensation paled by comparability with different executives in Bankman-Fried’s crypto empires. Of the $3.2 billion that went to the change’s founders and different high workers, $6 million went to Ellison, versus $587 million to FTX’s head of engineering Nishad Singh, $246 million to Wang and $2.2 billion to Bankman-Fried.