Sam Bankman-Fried has appealed a decision to jail him for alleged witness tampering ahead of his Oct. 3 trial over the collapse of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange, Reuters reported. In a filing late on Friday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Bankman-Fried's lawyers said that the 31-year-old former billionaire simply exercised his First Amendment rights by sharing writings by his former colleague and romantic partner Caroline Ellison with a New York Times reporter. Ellison is one of three former members of Bankman-Fried's inner circle expected to testify against him after pleading guilty to fraud. Bankman-Fried's lawyers said he shared her writings to defend his reputation, not to intimidate her. "It is unclear how a cooperating witness who has promised to testify against a defendant could be meaningfully threatened by nothing but their own statements being published by a reputable newspaper," Bankman-Fried's lawyers wrote. In her writings, which predated FTX's November 2022 collapse, Ellison described feeling "unhappy and overwhelmed" with her job and "hurt/rejected" from her breakup with Bankman-Fried. Prosecutors said Bankman-Fried released those writings to harass Ellison and to dissuade others from testifying if they thought he would make them look bad in the press.
