Exclusive: Sam Bankman-Fried, in Previously Unseen Prison Diary, Calls Himself an ‘Outie in an Innie’s World’

A previously unseen fragment of a prison diary kept by the fallen mogul Sam Bankman-Fried offers the most intimate look yet at his experience behind bars following convictions for bank fraud following the implosion of FTX, once one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges.The excerpt was shared on Substack by Mr. Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara Fried, formerly a longtime professor at Stanford Law School. The selection from Mr. Bankman-Fried’s diary comes at the end of an essay penned by his mother entitled “Breaking My Silence.” In it she discusses candidly what she calls the “bonfire that had engulfed us.” Ms. Fried writes that she is now driven to speak out because of the “enormity of the personal tragedy that a young man with staggering talents and noble ambitions will spend most of the rest of his useful life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit — that no one committed.” Mr. Bankman-Fried appealed his convictions to a panel of the Second United States Appeals Circuit, maintaining that his first trial was “fundamentally unfair.”The appellate court appeared skeptical of that argument during oral arguments in November, with one circuit rider finding that there was “very substantial evidence of guilt.” Mr. Bankman-Fried has also launched a second pro se appeal, filed by Ms. Fried on her son’s behalf, that accuses the government of intimidating witnesses. It argues that “since the trial, multiple people have spoken out about how a weaponized DOJ pressured them into withdrawing as witnesses for Bankman-Fried’s defense.” At one point Mr. Bankman-Fried possessed a fortune, on paper, of some $26 billion.Now Ms. Fried writes that her son “has been keeping a journal since he was sent to prison in August 2023, which is now 500+ pages and counting. It is equal parts a sociology of prison life, philosophical musings, and reflections on himself and the outside world he briefly walked largely in.” She likens some of the vignettes contained in the journal to “Hogan’s Heroes minus the loveable Nazis.” The entry that she shared via email was written at the federal government’s notorious Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn. He is now at Terminal Island in California.Mr. Bankman-Fried writes that “positive emotions are not something that I feel. They never have been. The closest I get is, sometimes, when there isn’t a worry on my mind, I’m walking along, and a brisk wind blows past me, and all I can feel is the mild coldness enveloping me, and my mind blanks out. ” He insists that he has “tried to devote my life to whatever’s best for the world.”Mr. Bankman-Fried, who some predicted could one day become the world’s first trillionaire, now writes that “that Sam is decaying away rapidly. I feel it slipping away. I feel it, constantly, in the background, like you feel the clock ticking when a painful medical procedure is scheduled in an hour.” He contends that his own sense of self “won’t survive 25 years in prison. I’m not sure it will survive 5. My context becomes old and stale, my memories start to blur.” Despite his incarceration, Mr. Bankman-Fried appears to have watched the hit Apple TV series, “Severance.” Writing at what he calls “the worst prison in the country,” declares that “meaning is different here. I’m an outie in an innie’s world.” He vows, though, “I won’t become an innie — I refuse to, and anyway there’s no point.”

Exclusive: Sam Bankman-Fried, in Previously Unseen Prison Diary, Calls Himself an ‘Outie in an Innie’s World’

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