Who is Caroline Ellison, a key witness testifying against Sam Bankman-Fried?

investing.com:

By Luc Cohen

NEW YORK -In 2018, a bespectacled Stanford graduate named Caroline Ellison decided to leave her job on Wall Street to join a startup cryptocurrency hedge fund called Alameda Research because she thought she would earn more money to give to charitable causes.

On Tuesday, nearly a year after Alameda collapsed, Ellison took the stand to testify as a key witness at the criminal fraud trial against its founder, another budding young philanthropist who owned the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange: Sam Bankman-Fried.

«Alameda took several billion dollars of money from FTX customers and used it for our own investments and to repay debts that we had,» Ellison said on the stand.

Ellison became one of Bankman-Fried's top lieutenants as he expanded his crypto empire. The two lived together in a luxury penthouse in the Bahamas, and were on-and-off romantic partners.

Her firsthand account could be crucial to efforts by Manhattan federal prosecutors to convict Bankman-Fried on fraud charges stemming from FTX's November 2022 implosion. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of stealing billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at Alameda.

Ellison, who became Alameda's co-chief executive in 2021 and assumed full control last year, has pleaded guilty to fraud charges and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

When asked on Tuesday by prosecutor Danielle Sassoon whether she had committed crimes, Ellison replied, «Yes we did.» She said Bankman-Fried directed her to commit crimes including fraud.

She said at a Dec. 19, 2022, plea hearing that she helped Alameda make billions of dollars in loans to Bankman-Fried and other FTX executives, and hide them from lenders. During the hearing, Ellison said she was