Eight Media Outlets Ask Judge to Reveal Who Guaranteed Sam Bankman-Fried’s $250 Million Bond

NEW YORK—Eight major Media outlets on Thursday asked the U.S. judge overseeing Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal case to make public the names of two people who helped guarantee the FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder’s $250 million bond.

Saying the public interest “cannot be overstated,” lawyers for the outlets, including Reuters, said the public’s right to know Bankman-Fried’s guarantors outweighed their privacy and safety rights.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan, the lawyers distinguished the case from another judge’s December 2020 decision not to reveal who guaranteed a bond for British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, then accused and later convicted of aiding in financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes.

“While Mr. Bankman-Fried is accused of serious financial crimes, a public association with him does not carry nearly the same stigma as with the Jeffrey Epstein child sex trafficking scandal,” Lawyers for the outlets wrote.

Media seeking to identify Bankman-Fried’s sureties also include the Associated Press, Bloomberg, CNBC, Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones, the Financial Times, Insider, and the Washington Post. The New York Times asked for separate names.

A spokesperson for Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell (representing Bankman-Fried), declined to comment. Cohen and Everdell also represented Maxwell during Maxwell’s criminal trial.

In seeking to keep the sureties’ names under wraps, Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said their client’s parents, who co-signed the $250 million bond, had been harassed and received physical threats since FTX’s early November collapse and bankruptcy.

According to the lawyers, there was “serious cause for concern” If their names were made public, the additional sureties could be subject to similar treatment.

Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty in criminal charges that he stole billions at FTX. This was partly because he diverted customer deposits to help his Alameda Research hedge funds, buy real property, and make political donations.

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