Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, the parents of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted after the exchange’s collapse, used their first televised interview to challenge the core premise of his conviction, arguing that no customer money was ultimately lost.
"The money was always there," Bankman said during a weekend interview with CNN's Michael Smerconish. "These were very profitable companies with billions of extra assets."
The timing is not incidental. At the end of March, the FTX Recovery Trust is set to distribute about $2.2 billion in its fourth payout, bringing total recoveries to roughly $10 billion. Several U.S. customer classes will reach 100% recovery, with one class at 120%. For Bankman-Fried's parents, those figures should mean SBF's exoneration.
“Everybody has been made whole with 18 to 43 percent interest,” Fried said.
All distributions are denominated in U.S. dollars and are fixed to asset prices as of the November 2022 bankruptcy filing, when bitcoin traded near $16,800. FTX collapsed in late 2022, upending investor confidence and sparking a wave of regulatory scrutiny across the industry.
Bitcoin has been on a rollercoaster since then, shooting up to over $126,000 during the fall of 2025, and now trading around $69,000, way above the price in late 2022.
However, an FTX customer who held one bitcoin receives the dollar value of that 2022 claim, plus interest, not the asset or its current price. The estate is returning roughly 119% of a claim frozen at a fraction of today’s market value.
FTX creditor representative Sunil Kavuri has publicly rejected the framing, writing that “FTX creditors are not whole.”
The parents’ defense also runs counter to the regulatory framework established in response to the collapse. Bankman described the transfer of customer funds to sister company Alameda Research as routine.
“They were borrowed by Alameda from FTX,” he said. “Alameda acted like everybody else, putting in money and borrowing money.”
If accepted, that argument would normalize the commingling of customer assets with a proprietary trading firm, the exact practice new rules in Hong Kong, the E.U., and proposed U.S. legislation now prohibit. The logic that exonerates Bankman-Fried is the same logic regulators moved to eliminate.
Fried went further, calling the prosecution “essentially political” and arguing the Biden administration “had decided to destroy crypto.”
The political framing reflects a broader clemency push toward President Donald Trump, as Bankman-Fried continues to support White House policy from prison via posts on X.
Smerconish noted that Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over SBF's criminal trial and sentenced him to 25 years, is the same federal judge who oversaw E. Jean Carroll's civil case against Trump, a point he said was "not lost on" the family.
Asked what she would say to Trump, Fried called her son "one of the most brilliant, talented young men of his generation" and said he would be "an enormous benefit to the economy" if freed.
But that door appears closed, at least for now.
Trump said in a January interview with the New York Times that he would not consider a pardon for Bankman-Fried even as Trump has granted clemency to other crypto figures, including Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.
Polymarket bettors give it a 12% chance of happening.
Bankman-Fried’s appeal remains pending, and his motion for a new trial faces opposition from prosecutors who have dismissed his claims of political bias.
