One thing Caroline Ellison’s lawyers and family members want you to know about her: She’s “a young person of enormous talent and promise, with a deep commitment to helping others.” Another: She’s a newly minted romance novelist.
Ellison, 29, will learn whether or not she’s going to prison Tuesday afternoon, for her work heading up Alameda Research, FTX’s trading arm. The collapse of the crypto exchange that was once worth over $30 billion ranks among the world’s biggest financial frauds.
Ellison is best known as the co-leader and erstwhile lover of Sam Bankman-Fried, the brains behind the crypto exchange who was recently sentenced to 25 years in prison. Ellison “occupied the gravitational center” of Bankman-Fried’s trial, Fortune wrote in 2023, delivering “some of the most explosive testimony of the case.”
Despite their fizzled flame, Ellison hasn’t cowered from accountability, and her lawyers say she’s not starting now. “Caroline blames no one but herself for what she did,” her defense wrote in a court filing. “She regrets her role deeply and will carry shame and remorse to her grave.” She pleaded guilty to numerous charges of fraud and money-laundering in 2022, and testified against Bankman-Fried from the witness stand a year later. Today, she's seeking no prison time.
Her testimony brought on an enormous amount of public judgment and ridicule. Bankman-Fried leaked Ellison’s personal writing to the New York Times, which promptly published it, and information about their sex life was published in a book about the collapse called Going Infinite.
Entering and exiting the courtroom while on the witness stand, Ellison was mobbed by hordes of cameras and battled invasive press coverage—but she endured the abuse in order to see justice served, according to her lawyers. “The Government cannot think of another cooperating witness in recent history who has received a greater level of attention and harassment,” Ellison’s lawyers wrote.
While waiting to be sentenced, Ellison has made honest attempts at rebuilding her life, but has been stymied at every turn, her lawyers wrote—including in her failed attempts to find a paying job. (She's "effectively unemployable," her lawyers said.)
Instead of working, she’s spent the past two years engaging in charity work, including helping low-income Bronx residents file their taxes. She’s also started dating again, and is currently partnered with a fellow former FTX employee whom a source says is “kind, honest and empathetic” in a way Bankman-Fried never was.
Ellison has also used the past year to pursue another passion: writing.
In a letter to the judge, Ellison’s mother, professor Sara Fisher Ellison, wrote that Ellison has completed a romantic novella and is already at work on a follow-up. The finished novella is “set in Edwardian England and loosely based on [Ellison's] sister Kate’s imagined amorous exploits, to Kate’s great delight,” her mother wrote.
Alongside creative writing, Ellison—a math whiz and Stanford grad—is also penning a high school math textbook with help of her parents, economics professors at MIT.
