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- Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers requested for a judge to keep confidential the identities of two individuals who helped him secure bail, Bloomberg reports.
- “If the two remaining sureties are publicly identified, they will likely be subjected to probing media scrutiny,” the lawyers wrote.
- Bankman-Fried is set to appear in court Tuesday in New York.
On Tuesday, Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers filed a letter requesting that a judge to redact the names of two individuals who helped the disgraced FTX founder secure his $250 million bail package, according to a Bloomberg report.
“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,” the lawyers wrote, per Bloomberg. “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.”
The two individuals signed on as sureties for Bankman-Fried’s massive bail, which was granted after his parents put up their $4 million Palo Alto, California property as collateral. The judge had asked that the hefty sticker price of the bond be signed on by two others of “considerable means,” and that one of the individuals must not be a relative.
According to the lawyers’ letter cited in the report, those individuals haven’t signed on yet but intend to do so by January 5.
Since being extradited from the Bahamas to the US, Bankman-Fried has been staying at his parents’ home, which has five bedrooms and a swimming pool. There, he takes daily jogs with a security detail that costs upwards of $10,000 a week, the New York Post reported in December.
The ex-FTX chief is scheduled to appear in federal court on Tuesday in New York, and he is expected to plea not guilty to charges that include swindling investors out of billions of dollars.
Should he be convicted of all charges, he could face up to 115 years in prison.
