Caroline Ellison Reveals She Was With a New Flame When SBF Investigators Came Knocking
It didn’t take long for her to move on from her ex, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
REUTERS/Cheney Orr
Caroline Ellison, who has spent three days testifying against her former boyfriend and boss, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, lobbed one more barb on Thursday, revealing that she was with a new boyfriend when the FBI raided her parents’ home in Nov. 2022.
Ellison, 28, said she and Bankman-Fried had commenced a sexual relationship in 2018, then dated off and on through mid-2022. After splitting with him for the final time, her professional life suffered, she said. “I found it difficult to have in person, one-on-one conversations with him,” she recalled on Thursday.
By November, when FTX and its sister trading firm Alameda Research collapsed, she had already moved on to a new flame, she said.
In fact, when the FBI raided her parents’ home, she was there with her boyfriend and her mom’s housekeeper, she said. Ellison didn’t reveal her new boyfriend’s name, though she said he also worked for the crypto firm.
During her three days on the stand, Ellison, who said she was at one point worth $1 billion, has repeatedly blamed Bankman-Fried for the crypto exchange’s collapse.
Asked on Tuesday if she had committed any crimes during her time at Alameda, she replied, “Yes, we did,” and admitted to engaging in fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, and money laundering.
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“He directed me to commit these crimes,” she said of her then-boyfriend.
She said that, in all, she and her co-conspirators misappropriated $14 billion in customer deposits to pay off loans and fund investments, though she said they were able to repay some of those assets.
She further claimed that, at Bankman-Fried’s direction, she compiled misleading balance sheets that hid Alameda’s true risk profile from lenders. At the same time, she claimed, Bankman-Fried worked to obscure his involvement with Alameda, hoping to avoid public relations issues if people came to realize the hedge fund was closely intertwined with FTX.
At one point during her testimony on Wednesday, she broke down in tears when she was asked to explain messages she and Bankman-Fried exchanged around the time FTX was imploding, in which Ellison wrote, “this is the best mood I’ve been in in like a year.”
“To be clear, that was overall the worst week of my life,” she said, adding that “I felt this sense of relief that I didn’t have to lie anymore.”
On Thursday, prosecutors played an audio tape of Ellison speaking to Alameda employees around that time, in which she sat in a beanbag chair and admitted that the trading firm had taken customers’ money to fund risky loans and investments.
Asked who was to blame for the mess, Ellison laughed nervously and said, “Sam, I guess.”
The recording of the all-hands meeting was taken by a staffer who had joined the company just three days earlier.
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