A federal judge in Manhattan denied FTX CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s request for a new trial, rejecting his claim that there was new evidence.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw Bankman-Fried’s 2023 trial and sentenced him to 25 years in prison in early 2024, wrote in order on Tuesday that Bankman-Fried’s claim of new evidence and witnesses was without merit.
“This request appears to be part of a plan to save his reputation that Bankman-Fried hatched and even undertook to write after FTX declared bankruptcy but before it was indicted,” Judge Kaplan wrote.
In February, Bankman-Fried requested a new trial overseen by a different judge, making the rare move of filing the motion without consulting his lawyers and while an appeals court considered his conviction and sentence.
On Wednesday, Bankman-Fried asked to withdraw his motion, telling Judge Kaplan that he did not believe he would “get a fair hearing on this subject before you,” which the judge denied.
Sam Bankman-Fried appeared on the podcast in March 2025 while incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Source: YouTube
In his order, Judge Kaplan wrote that Bankman-Fried’s claim that the three former FTX executives can counter the government’s arguments that FTX is insolvent “is without merit on multiple independently sufficient levels.”
“None of the witnesses, for example, were ‘newly discovered.’
Bankman-Fried argued that two former FTX executives who did not testify — Ryan Salame, former CEO of FTX’s Bahamian subsidiary, and Daniel Chapsky, FTX’s former head of data science — could counter the government’s claims about the exchange’s financial health.
Salame pleaded guilty separately to violating campaign finance laws and running an illegal money transmission business. In May 2024, he was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.
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He also claimed that Nishad Singh, FTX’s former engineering manager, who took a plea deal with prosecutors to avoid prison and testify against Bankman-Fried at trial, changed his testimony “after threats from the government.”
Judge Kaplan said Bankman-Fried could have asked the trio to testify, but did not, and his claim that their absence or decision to testify against him was the result of government threats “is insanely conspiratorial and completely inconsistent with the record.”
Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven counts of wire fraud and money laundering, and a jury found that he illegally funneled billions of dollars of FTX clients’ money to trading firm Alameda Research to make risky trades that contributed to the stock market collapse.
Bankman-Fried is being held at a federal prison in Lompoc, California.
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