TL;DR
- Sam Bankman-Fried withdrew his Rule 33 motion for a new trial, saying he does not believe Judge Lewis Kaplan would give him a fair hearing.
- He asked to withdraw the motion without prejudice, preserving the right to refile after his direct appeal and reassignment request are resolved.
- The appeal now carries greater weight as he continues challenging his conviction and 25-year sentence in the FTX fraud case in federal court.
Sam Bankman-Fried has stepped back from a courtroom fight, withdrawing his motion for a new trial while his broader appeal continues to move through federal court. The surprising part is not that he is still contesting the case, but that he has chosen to pause one of his main procedural attacks because he does not believe the current judge would give him a fair hearing. In a letter he asked to withdraw the Rule 33 motion without prejudice, preserving the option to bring it back later rather than forcing the issue now.
That move narrows the legal battle without ending it. What Bankman-Fried is doing, in practical terms, is trading a near-term retrial push for a cleaner path through appeal. He told Judge Lewis Kaplan that he would not get a fair hearing on the retrial question in front of him, and tied the withdrawal to two unresolved matters: his direct appeal and a separate request to reassign the case to a different judge. By withdrawing without prejudice, he keeps the retrial argument alive while avoiding an immediate ruling for now, while keeping his options fully intact.
The appeal now carries more of the weight
The filing also pulled back the curtain on how the retrial motion was prepared. A procedural fight over authorship had started to compete with the substance of the request itself, and that appears to have become part of the problem. Bankman-Fried said he conceived, researched, and drafted the motion while incarcerated in Brooklyn, while his parents, Barbara Fried and Joe Bankman, helped with edits and printing because of limited computer access. He also said attorneys involved in other parts of his case did not meaningfully shape the final filing, after scrutiny over possible ghostwriting claims.
The broader case remains a consequential fraud prosecution to emerge from crypto’s collapse cycle. Bankman-Fried is still serving a 25-year sentence after being convicted on seven counts tied to the collapse of FTX and the misuse of customer funds, and his core strategy now leans more heavily on appeal. That appeal is pending before the Second Circuit, where his team is challenging the fairness of the original trial and the evidentiary limits imposed by Kaplan. By stepping back from a retrial request for now, he is not abandoning the fight. He is reorganizing it.
