Law/Justice

Caroline Ellison slams ex Sam Bankman-Fried at trial: ‘He directed me to commit these crimes’

Sam Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison confronted the disgraced crypto titan in court Tuesday — matter-of-factly telling jurors that he bears the blame for deciding to steal billions in FTX customer funds.

“He directed me to commit these crimes,” Ellison said in Manhattan federal court, during her highly anticipated testimony at a trial where Bankman-Fried faces criminal fraud charges stemming from the November 2022 disappearance of $8 billion from his now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange.

Ellison, 28, also set the record straight on why her on-and-off romance with the fallen crypto king, 31, ended — accusing him of being emotionally distant and not devoting enough attention to their relationship during their time living together in a $35 million Bahamas penthouse.

“There was a general theme that I sort of wanted more from our relationship,” Ellison told jurors. “I sort of felt like he was distant or not paying attention to me.”

The former CEO of Alameda Research and Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend is serving as prosecutors’ star witness.
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The Stanford-educated math whiz disclosed that the pair first slept together in the fall of 2018, and went on to date for about a year, from summer 2020 to summer 2021.

During the entirely of the relationship, Bankman-Fried “was also my boss at work, which created some awkward situations,” Ellison testified.

Bankman-Fried — who was prone to crunching the numbers on every aspect of his life — bizarrely boasted while they were dating that there was a “5 percent chance that he’d become president some day,” Ellison told the court.

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