www.citationneeded.news/sam-bankman-…
— Anne Laurie (@annelaurie.bsky.social) March 30, 2026 at 1:39 AM
… That very nasty judge simply refuses to understand why her favorite performing pet beloved son should not be treated like some common felon!!!… Molly White’s Citation Needed, always a good read:
On Monday, Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan issued an order: Sam Bankman-Fried — currently serving a 25-year sentence for the massive fraud he perpetrated at his FTX cryptocurrency exchange — must declare, under penalty of perjury, whether attorneys drafted the supposedly pro se filings submitted under his name.
The order is the latest episode in an increasingly bizarre saga involving Bankman-Fried and his Stanford law professor parents, who are filing — and perhaps also drafting — legal documents on behalf of their 34-year-old son.
The whole mess began in February, when Barbara Fried — professor emerita of legal ethics at Stanford who retired in 2022a — filed on her son’s behalf a motion seeking a new trial before a new judge. This was odd from the start, as Bankman-Fried currently has an appeal under consideration before the Second Circuit, where a panel of judges heard his arguments in November that FTX merely had a liquidity problem, not a solvency problem, and that all his customers were repaid anyway, so no harm no foul. He also argued that he was deprived of a fair trial by Judge Kaplan, who presided over his 2023 trial, and who had prohibited him from discussing his reliance on FTX attorneys’ counsel after he opted not to present a formal advice-of-counsel defense. With an appeal open in which he presents the same arguments with the assistance of high-powered legal counsel, why file a separate motion at all — and why opt to proceed pro se (represent himself) despite having no legal background, rather than use those attorneys to help him draft it?
He probably shouldn’t, and legally, he can’t. A defendant cannot simultaneously be represented by counsel and proceed pro se. Furthermore, if either of his parents, or any other attorney, drafted the motion and then filed it claiming it was from their son acting pro se, they would be misleading the court. The pro se designation exists to give judges discretion to be more lenient with defendants who lack legal training, not as a vehicle for attorneys to file motions in courts where they’re not admitted while avoiding the requirements that would apply if they were openly representing their client.
If an attorney drafted Bankman-Fried’s motion, then it’s not pro se. If Barbara Fried wrote it, she’s practicing law in a court where she’s not admitted. And if Sam Bankman-Fried signed off on a filing claiming he wrote something someone else actually wrote, he’s lying to a federal judge…
Also on March 11, Barbara Fried published a Substack post comparing Judge Kaplan to Irving Kaufman — the judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs to death in the 1950s — and wrote that Kaplan “seems to take pleasure in his cruelty.”…
Sam Bankman-Fried’s campaign
This motion for a new trial is part of a multi-front public relations and legal campaign by Bankman-Fried and his family to secure his freedom, alongside his ongoing Second Circuit appeal and an increasingly overt appeal for a presidential pardon.