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On Tuesday, Sam Bankman-Fried's lawyers filed a letter requesting that a judge to redact the names of two individuals who helped the disgraced FTX founder secure his $250 million bail package, according to a Bloomberg report.
"If the two remaining sureties are publicly identified, they will likely be subjected to probing media scrutiny, and potentially targeted for harassment, despite having no substantive connection to the case," the lawyers wrote, per Bloomberg. "Consequently, the privacy and safety of the sureties are 'countervailing factors' that significantly outweigh the presumption of public access to the very limited information at issue."
The two individuals signed on as sureties for Bankman-Fried's massive bail, which was granted after his parents put up their $4 million Palo Alto, California property as collateral. The judge had asked that the hefty sticker price of the bond be signed on by two others of "considerable means," and that one of the individuals must not be a relative.
According to the lawyers' letter cited in the report, those individuals haven't signed on yet but intend to do so by January 5.
Bankman-Fried said that his parents — Stanford law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried — are already "the target of intense media scrutiny, harassment, and threats," and that they've been subjected to "a steady stream of threatening correspondence, including communications expressing a desire that they suffer physical harm."
The $250 million bail agreement was controversial, as the court determined it wouldn't actually need to be paid out, and instead just secured by collateral put up by Bankman-Fried's parents, who won't be on the hook unless he's found to have violated the terms of his release.
Bankman-Fried is expected to enter a plea at a hearing on Jan. 3, on eight criminal counts over what federal prosecutors described as "a sweeping fraud scheme" at his crypto currency exchange FTX.
Since being extradited from the Bahamas to the US, Bankman-Fried has been staying at his parents' home, which has five bedrooms and a swimming pool. There, he takes daily jogs with a security detail that costs upwards of $10,000 a week, the New York Post reported in December.