Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman-Fried’s Ex, Gives Most Damning Testimony Yet

The highly anticipated testimony of Sam Bankman-Fried's ex-girlfriend began Tuesday when Caroline Ellison took the witness stand at his $8 billion fraud trial in New York City and said he "directed" her crimes.

Ellison appeared in U.S. District Court in Manhattan shortly after 12:30 p.m. and was sworn in wearing a red dress, black blazer and glasses.

When asked to identify Bankman-Fried, she stood up and scanned the courtroom for about 20 seconds before saying he was "over there, wearing a blue suit."

Asked by Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon if she'd committed any crimes with him while working at his Alameda Research hedge fund, Ellison said, "Yes, we did."

"Sam and I and others," she said.

"Fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering."

Ellison, 28, said Bankman-Fried, 31, "was originally the CEO of Alameda and then the owner of Alameda and then he directed me to commit these crimes.”

"We took several billion dollars from customers and used it for other investments we had," she told jurors.

When asked what role Bankman-Fried played in the alleged scam, Ellison said that he "set up these systems that allowed Alameda to take the money and directed us to take customer money."

Ellison also said she recalled meeting Bankman-Fried when she was an intern at the powerhouse Wall Street firm Jane Street Capital "and we worked together at Alameda and we later dated for a couple of years."

Ellison's brief testimony, which followed that of Gary Wang, a co-founder of Bankman-Fried's FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was interrupted for a lunch break.

She's expected to detail her personal history when Day 4 of Bankman-Fried's trial continues later in the day.

Earlier, she was photographed with her head down, wearing large sunglasses and a light blue baseball cap as FBI agents escorted her into a federal courthouse in Manhattan.

Ellison is serving as the prosecution's star witness after pleading guilty to seven felonies in a deal for leniency over her role in last November's collapse of FTX and Alameda.

The Stanford University math major, who was Alameda's CEO, admitted misleading investors between July and October 2022 about billions of dollars in secret loans to Bankman-Fried, 31, and other FTX executives.

She's expected to face fierce cross-examination by the defense, which blames the bankruptcies on failures by Bankman-Fried's lieutenants to protect his companies from last year's 70%-plus crash in crypto prices.

Ellison's on-again, off-again relationship with Bankman-Fried reportedly included living with him and other FTX execs in a $30 million, six-bedroom penthouse in the Bahamas that was bought by a company subsidiary as a "residence for key personnel."

Unidentified sources told the CoinDesk website that the 10 roommates "paired up in relationships with each other."

The report, along with a post about polyamory attributed to Ellison on the Tumblr blogging website, fueled speculation that the group comprised a "polycule," or network of people in non-monogamous relationships.

Bankman-Fried was indicted in December and extradited from the Bahamas, then released on a $250 million bond to house arrest at his parents' home.

But in August, he was locked up in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn for leaking personal writings by Ellison to the New York Times in what prosecutors described as an attempt to “publicly discredit a government witness.”