Major media want to know who guaranteed Sam Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bond

Eight major media outlets on Thursday asked the U.S. judge overseeing Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal case to make public the names of two people who helped guarantee the FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder’s $250 million bond.

Saying the public interest “cannot be overstated,” lawyers for the outlets, including Reuters, said the public’s right to know Bankman-Fried’s guarantors outweighed their privacy and safety rights.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan, the lawyers distinguished the case from another judge’s December 2020 decision not to reveal who guaranteed a bond for British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, then accused and later convicted of aiding in financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes.