One factor Caroline Ellison’s attorneys and members of the family need you to learn about her: She’s “a young person of enormous talent and promise, with a deep commitment to helping others.” One other: She’s a newly minted romance novelist.
Ellison, 29, will be taught whether or not or not she’s going to jail Tuesday afternoon, for her work heading up Alameda Analysis, FTX’s buying and selling arm. The collapse of the crypto trade that was as soon as price over $30 billion ranks among the many world’s greatest monetary frauds.
Ellison is finest often known as the co-leader and erstwhile lover of Sam Bankman-Fried, the brains behind the crypto trade who was lately sentenced to 25 years in jail. Ellison “occupied the gravitational center” of Bankman-Fried’s trial, Fortune wrote in 2023, delivering “some of the most explosive testimony of the case.”
Regardless of their fizzled flame, Ellison hasn’t cowered from accountability, and her attorneys say she’s not beginning now. “Caroline blames no one but herself for what she did,” her protection wrote in a court docket submitting. “She regrets her role deeply and will carry shame and remorse to her grave.” She pleaded responsible to quite a few fees of fraud and money-laundering in 2022, and testified in opposition to Bankman-Fried from the witness stand a 12 months later. Immediately, she’s looking for no jail time.
Her testimony introduced on an infinite quantity of public judgment and mock. Bankman-Fried leaked Ellison’s private writing to the New York Instances, which promptly printed it, and details about their intercourse life was printed in a guide concerning the collapse referred to as Going Infinite.
Coming into and exiting the courtroom whereas on the witness stand, Ellison was mobbed by hordes of cameras and battled invasive press protection—however she endured the abuse with the intention to see justice served, in accordance with her attorneys. “The Government cannot think of another cooperating witness in recent history who has received a greater level of attention and harassment,” Ellison’s attorneys wrote.
Whereas ready to be sentenced, Ellison has made sincere makes an attempt at rebuilding her life, however has been stymied at each flip, her attorneys wrote—together with in her failed makes an attempt to discover a paying job. (She’s “effectively unemployable,” her attorneys mentioned.)
As an alternative of working, she’s spent the previous two years participating in charity work, together with serving to low-income Bronx residents file their taxes. She’s additionally began courting once more, and is presently partnered with a fellow former FTX worker whom a supply says is “kind, honest and empathetic” in a method Bankman-Fried by no means was.
Ellison has additionally used the previous 12 months to pursue one other ardour: writing.
In a letter to the decide, Ellison’s mom, professor Sara Fisher Ellison, wrote that Ellison has accomplished a romantic novella and is already at work on a follow-up. The completed novella is “set in Edwardian England and loosely based on [Ellison’s] sister Kate’s imagined amorous exploits, to Kate’s great delight,” her mom wrote.
Alongside inventive writing, Ellison—a math whiz and Stanford grad—can be penning a highschool math textbook with assist of her mother and father, economics professors at MIT.
