Assistant U.S. attorney Nicolas Roos stood

Assistant U.S. attorney Nicolas Roos stood in front of jurors from 10 a.m. ET until the court broke for lunch around 1 p.m. reiterating the prosecution’s case: Bankman-Fried lied, made false promises and is responsible for billions of dollars lost for thousands of investors on FTX. And on top of that, that Bankman-Fried had many opportunities to come clean, but didn’t.

 

At one especially dramatic moment, Roos pointed at the defendant and said, “Who is responsible? This man: Samuel Bankman-Fried.” The former CEO of FTX did not look back, but he tilted his head slightly.

 

Meanwhile, Mark Cohen, Bankman-Fried’s lead attorney, said the government is making a Hallmark movie-like case against Bankman-Fried and that he made “bad business judgments.”

 

“The government has tried to paint Sam into some sort of villain, some sort of monster,” Cohen said, using a soft voice. He mentioned that the prosecution has brought up his looks, the $30 million Bahamas apartment in which he lived with other execs, celebrity connections and his sex life. The prosecution did this, Cohen said, “to make him into someone you dislike … rather than make the case.”

 

His appearance, romantic relationships or being the “worst dressed CEO” have nothing to do with whether he’s guilty, Cohen said. “Every movie needs a villain … they wrote him in as [one].”

 

The prosecutor emphasized how it was wrong of FTX to use customers’ funds without their knowledge or approval. “It was a universal view: Customer funds belong to customers and can’t be used,” Roos said, adding that even FTX’s terms of service stated that users’ deposits belonged to users.