Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” begins with a well-known theorem; “every happy family is the same…” The epic of the Bankman and Fried family appears to follow similar lines.  

On Mother’s Day, six months before the collapse of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried sent from his luxury Bahamian residence a tweet about his mom, Barbara Fried: “She’s a professor at Stanford Law School, but some of her best work has been in philosophy.” 

Mr. Bankman-Fried claimed that his mother’s thinking had “guided” his family’s life. Now Mr. Bankman-Fried is at the center of what is being called the fraud of the century and is locked up in a rat-infested prison awaiting extradition to America.

Ms. Fried, was herself last seen sporting a red backpack as she trundled into her son’s bail hearing in a courtroom at Nassau. CoinDesk reports that she laughed intermittently during her son’s bail hearing, scoffing at the notion that he was a risk to turn “fugitive.” 

The disgraced founder’s father, Joseph Bankman, is also a professor at the Palo Alto-based school, whose website describes him as a “leading scholar in the field of tax law.” Both of their names were inked on the deed for a $14.6 million Bahamian beachfront property. During that hearing, Mr. Bankman was reported to have stopped his ears to avoid hearing the proceedings.  

It appears as if Ms. Fried and Mr. Bankman are involved parents. They have been hunkered down with their son since the news of FTX’s implosion broke. The company’s current chief executive, John Ray III, told lawmakers that he is “investigating” their role in the scheme. 

Mr. Bankman has already confirmed that he “received payments” from FTX over the course of 11 months. A spokesman for the family, Risa Heller, told the New York Times that those fees were for charitable work. He told a podcast in August that his son’s “company didn’t have any lawyers.”

Ms. Fried, along with a former dean of the law school, Paul Brest, ran a political action committee  named “Mind the Gap.” Their mission was to elect Democrats, and according to Vox, they “operate in a cone of silence” to convince Silicon Valley tycoons to give millions of dollars to Democrats.

Another former dean of Stanford Law School, Larry Kramer, is quoted by the Times as saying in respect of Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried that  “you don’t want to be seen with them” and “I don’t see how this doesn’t bankrupt them.” 

The professorial pair will likely not be seen on campus this coming quarter. Mr. Bankman’s course on “Tax Policy” next term has been canceled, and Ms. Fried is now listed as a professor “emerita” with no course assignments.  She is quoted by the Stanford Daily as saying  that this was a “long planned” change in status and that  her retirement has “nothing to do with anything else going on.”

It is hard to bring to mind another financial scandal that is as much of a family drama as this gathering storm. That brings us back to Tolstoy’s observation that while every happy family could be the same, “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” 

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Correction: CoinDesk reported that Barbara Fried laughed intermittently during her son’s bail hearing. An earlier version misstated the source of that report.