Who are Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents, Joseph Bankman, Barbara Fried?

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was allowed to post a bond of $250 million and live under house arrest at his parent’s home in California as he awaits trial on fraud charges, a New York judge has ruled Thursday.

Bankman-Fried has been hit with multiple charges from the Southern District of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission after he was arrested by authorities in the Bahamas earlier in the month.

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The charges against the disgraced crypto exchange include conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to defraud the Federal Election Commission and commit campaign finance violations, according to the Justice Department.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos proposed strict bail terms, including the exorbitant bond amount and house arrest at Bankman-Fried’s parents’ home in Palo Alto, California.

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Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein agreed to the bond and also approved the house arrest proposal adding that Bankman-Fried would require to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet before leaving the Manhattan courthouse.

Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried are the parents of Sam Bankman-Fried.

Who is Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried?

Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried are both professors at Stanford University, where they teach law. According to New York Times, their colleagues are now gossiping about their alleged involvement in their son’s FTX schemes

While Bankman specializes in tax law and is the author of two casebooks on the subject, Fried is a professor emerita of law at Stanford.

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Fried has written about tax policy but her “scholarly interests lie at the intersection of law, economics, and philosophy.” She has won the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Both of them have ties to the Democratic Party. Bankman assisted in writing Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s failed legislation to simplify the tax code in 2016.  He has also donated thousands of dollars to Democratic campaigns, including Warren’s.

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Super political action committee Mind The Gap was co-founded by Fried in 2018. She resigned in November. She was also found to have close ties to her son’s donations to Democrats before the 2022 midterms. Unlike her husband, Fried was never a paid employee at FTX. 

Bankman-Fried bought a $16.4 million house in the Bahamas for his parents in FTX’s name.