Inside SBF Trial: Sam Bankman-Fried on Stand Spins Shorts and Trashes Caroline and KC Royals Crypto Creeps

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by Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book Substack

LITERARY SDNY, Oct 27 -- Twenty seventh day of October and SBF was finally on the witness stand. In front of the jury. It was, as it should be when a defendant testifies, a complete counter narrative, another way of telling the story.

  From an Airbnb in Berkeley to a small suite in Hong Kong, before the garish Bahamas condo.

The image too: Mark Cohen asked Sam why he always appeared in shorts and T-shirts. "It's comfortable," Sam replied. Would the jury be convinced?

Caroline Ellison had said it was all an act, that Sam bragged that his hair got him bonuses at Jane Street. What did that say about Jane Street?  

 Cohen presented Jane Street as the arbiter of what front-running is, and got Sam to say of course he was against frontrunning. What about misappropriation? The question of course didn't come up on direct.

Judge Kaplan told Cohen to return at 1:30 pm with a estimate of how much longer he'd be.  When he did, he said... into Monday morning.

 This trial was now stretching on. Who would remember, when it was over, what Caroline much less Adam Yedidia and the cocoa broker had said?  

 By late afternoon the strategy emerged: Sam said Caroline was a good manager, but implicitly dissed her trading, specifically hedging. She had refused to hedge, he said. But why then hadn't he fired her? And how could these sh*tcoins, as some now called the FTT token, be hedged? 

Court art courtesy of Elizabeth Williams to Inner City Press

  With the jury gone for the day, Judge Kaplan asked both sides for their time estimates. AUSA Sassoon said while no one would benefit from a day and a half of cross (!) she would go from midday Monday into Tuesday.

Each side wanted two to three hours for closing arguments, not including the government's rebuttal. Then there was the charging conference, which Kaplan predicted would be long, and the the reading of the charge to the jury: several hours, Judge Kaplan said.

  So the jury wouldn't get the case to deliberate until a full week from Sam's direct, the next Friday. And unlikely to reach any decision that day. So into another week. And what could happened by then?

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