Judge Lewis Kaplan denied the former FTX CEO’s motion, calling the request “a plan to save his reputation.”
Federal judge Lewis Kaplan has rejected Sam Bankman-Fried‘s request for a new trial, declaring his claims about new evidence to be unfounded. The ruling came on Tuesday, April 29, 2026, confirming the conviction of the former FTX founder.
In his order, Judge Kaplan – who had already presided over the 2023 trial and sentenced Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison in early 2024 – wrote that the motion “appears to be part of a plan to save his reputation, which Bankman-Fried devised and even put in writing after FTX filed for bankruptcy, but before he was indicted.”
In February, Bankman-Fried had filed the request for a new trial before a different judge, making the unusual move of submitting the motion without consulting his own attorneys, while an appeals court was already reviewing his conviction and sentence. The day after the ruling, Bankman-Fried asked to withdraw his request, telling Judge Kaplan that he did not believe he would receive “a fair hearing on this matter before her,” but the withdrawal was also denied.
Bankman-Fried had argued that three former FTX executives could have refuted the government’s arguments about the exchange’s insolvency. In particular, he cited Ryan Salame, former CEO of FTX’s Bahamian division, and Daniel Chapsky, former head of data science, as witnesses capable of disproving conclusions about the platform’s financial situation. Salame, however, had already separately pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws and operating an illegal money transmission business, and had been sentenced to seven and a half years in prison in May 2024.
The former FTX founder had also argued that Nishad Singh, former head of engineering at FTX who had cooperated with prosecutors to avoid prison and testified against him at trial, had altered his testimony “following threats from the government.” Judge Kaplan dismissed this claim as “wildly conspiratorial and completely contradicted by the record,” noting that Bankman-Fried could have attempted to secure testimony from the three individuals before the trial, but did not do so. “None of the witnesses, for example, is ‘newly discovered.’ Bankman-Fried knew all three of them well before the trial and presumably knew also what he hoped they would say if they had testified,” Kaplan wrote.
Bankman-Fried had been found guilty on seven counts related to fraud and money laundering. The jury determined that he had illegally transferred billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to trading firm Alameda Research, to carry out risky trades that contributed to the exchange’s collapse. He is currently held at a federal prison in Lompoc, California.
