Ms. Ellison, Sam Bankman-Fried’s former girlfriend and a top executive in his empire, is set to be sentenced on Sept. 24 for her role in the collapse of the crypto exchange.
Caroline Ellison, a close colleague of the disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, provided “extraordinary cooperation” to the government, federal prosecutors said on Tuesday, signaling that she should receive a lenient sentence for her role in the sweeping fraud that led to the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange.
Ms. Ellison, 29, who was also Mr. Bankman-Fried’s on-and-off girlfriend, pleaded guilty to fraud shortly after FTX collapsed in November 2022, alongside two other members of his inner circle. In a court filing this month, Ms. Ellison’s defense lawyers asked the judge overseeing the case, Lewis A. Kaplan, to sentence her to three years of supervised release, with no prison time.
In the government’s filing on Tuesday, prosecutors did not recommend a specific sentence to the judge but pointed out that her cooperation was “not only substantial, but exemplary.”
Ms. Ellison was the star witness at Mr. Bankman-Fried’s trial last fall in federal court, where she spent nearly three days on the stand. She described an incriminating spreadsheet that Mr. Bankman-Fried had used to mislead business partners and recounted the final days of FTX, holding back tears as she delivered some of the trial’s most emotional testimony.
Mr. Bankman-Fried was convicted of a sophisticated fraud that siphoned $8 billion from customer accounts to finance venture investments, political donations and other spending. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March.
Judge Kaplan is set to decide Ms. Ellison’s sentence in federal court in Manhattan on Sept. 24.
“In her many meetings with the government, Ellison approached her cooperation with remarkable candor, remorse and seriousness,” the prosecutors wrote in their 14-page memo to Judge Kaplan. “And she persevered despite harsh media and public scrutiny and Bankman-Fried’s efforts to publicly weaponize her personal writings to discredit and intimidate her.”
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