Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, has withdrawn his bid for a new trial after telling the judge overseeing his case that he doesn’t believe he’ll get a fair hearing.
The withdrawal, filed from federal prison in Lompoc, California, preserves his option to refile once his separate appeal plays out.
In a letter filed April 22, the disgraced crypto mogul told US District Judge Lewis Kaplan that he conceived, researched, and drafted the retrial motion largely on his own while housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
His parents, Stanford law professors Barbara Fried and Joe Bankman, assisted with editing and printing the document because his access to computers at the MDC was too restricted and intermittent to finalize the filing. None of the three attorneys involved in other phases of his case had meaningful input, he said.
The judge had specifically asked Bankman-Fried whether a lawyer had ghostwritten the motion. Rather than fight that line of questioning, he pulled the whole thing.
“I do not believe I will get a fair hearing on this topic in front of you,” he wrote to Judge Kaplan.
The retrial motion and its collapse
The retrial request, formally known as a Rule 33 motion, was originally filed in February through his mother. Under federal rules, it lets a defendant ask for a do-over based on newly discovered evidence or fundamental unfairness.
Bankman-Fried’s version argued that fresh evidence warranted the reopening of the case. But the filing immediately drew judicial scrutiny, not over its substance, but over who actually wrote it. That authorship question became a distraction that consumed the effort.
The FTX collapse and conviction
FTX imploded on November 11, 2022, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Roughly $8 billion in customer funds had been siphoned off.
Bankman-Fried went from gracing magazine covers and testifying before Congress to being a defendant in one of the largest financial fraud cases in American history.
A jury needed fewer than five hours of deliberation to convict him on all seven counts on November 2, 2023. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March 2024.
The conviction centered on the commingling of customer deposits between FTX and Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s affiliated trading firm. His defense leaned heavily on the argument that he relied on legal counsel’s advice when structuring those arrangements.
Judge Kaplan, however, placed tight restrictions on what evidence related to that advice-of-counsel defense could be presented to the jury. Those evidentiary limitations are now the backbone of his appeal.
The appeal
The appeal is currently before the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. During oral arguments in November 2025, his appellate attorney Alexandra Shapiro called the trial “fundamentally unfair,” pointing to the constraints Kaplan imposed on what the defense could tell jurors.
There’s also a pending request to reassign the case to a different judge entirely, a motion that essentially accuses Kaplan of bias. The withdrawal of the Rule 33 motion is explicitly tied to waiting for those two proceedings to resolve.
If the appeals court agrees that the trial was flawed, the retrial motion becomes moot. If it doesn’t, Bankman-Fried retains the right to bring it back.
By withdrawing “without prejudice,” he preserves the option to refile later without the baggage of the authorship controversy.
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