Everyone is seeing the tragedy that followed SBF’s FTX collapse. Media outlets around the world were obviously interested in Sam Bankman-Fried as he sat in his home under house arrest and wrote a lengthy blog entry.
SBF was given a $250 million bail back in December. It has been acknowledged as the largest pre-trial bail bond in American history. The judge reportedly asked two more people of “great means” to sign the bond due to the size of the bail. The names of these guarantors were kept a secret, nevertheless.
In a letter to New York District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan, eight media organizations, including the Associated Press, Bloomberg, CNBC, Dow Jones, The Financial Times, Insider, and the Washington Post, disputed the claim. These media companies were represented by lawyers from Davis Wright Tremaine LLP.
The lawyers stated in the letter that the public had a right to know who was the guarantor of SBF. They claimed,
“The public’s right to know Bankman-Fried’s guarantors outweighed their privacy and safety rights.”
Over the past three months, SBF’s parents, who also signed the bond, have received numerous threats. As a result, the guarantors’ names were kept a secret. Previously, SBF’s counsel emphasized the same, declaring,
“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.”
Media Advocates’ Take On SBF’s Guarantors
To show how minor FTX’s demise was, the attorneys contrasted SBF’s case with Jeffery Epstein’s child sex trafficking case. They consequently asked for information about the guarantors. It should be noted that Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawsuit dated December 2020 omitted the names of the bond guarantors.
The attorneys elaborated further, saying,
“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.”
Users hope that justice will be done as this case continues to take bizarre turns.