SBF’s parents told CNN that no customer money was lost. FTX’s creditors see things differently.

Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, the parents of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted after the stock market crash, used their first television interview to challenge the basic premise of his conviction, arguing that no customer money was ultimately lost.

“The money was still there,” Bankman said during a weekend interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish. “These were very profitable companies with billions in additional assets.”

The timing is not accidental. At the end of March, the FTX Recovery Trust is expected to distribute approximately $2.2 billion in its fourth installment, bringing total recoveries to approximately $10 billion. Several categories of American customers will achieve a recovery rate of 100%, including one class at 120%. For Bankman-Fried’s parents, these figures should mean exemption from the SBF.

“Everyone was cured with an interest of 18 to 43 percent,” Fried said.

All distributions are denominated in US dollars and are set to asset prices at the time of the November 2022 bankruptcy filing, when bitcoin was trading near $16,800. FTX collapsed in late 2022, upending investor confidence and sparking a wave of regulatory scrutiny across the industry.

Since then, Bitcoin has been on a roller coaster ride, reaching over $126,000 in the fall of 2025, and now trading around $69,000, well above the late 2022 price.

However, an FTX customer who held bitcoin receives the dollar value of that 2022 debt, plus interest, not the asset or its current price. The estate returns approximately 119% of a frozen claim at a fraction of the current market value.

FTX creditors’ representative Sunil Kavuri publicly rejected this theory, writing that “FTX’s creditors are not whole.”

The parents’ defense also flies in the face of the regulatory framework established in response to the collapse. Bankman described the transfer of client funds to sister company Alameda Research as routine.

“They were borrowed by Alameda from FTX,” he said. “Alameda acted like everyone else, investing and borrowing money.”

If accepted, this argument would normalize the commingling of client assets with a proprietary trading firm, the exact practice that new Hong Kong, EU rules and the US bill now prohibit. The logic that exonerates Bankman-Fried is the same logic that regulators decided to eliminate.

Fried went further, calling the accusation “essentially political” and arguing that the Biden administration “set out to destroy crypto.”

The political framework reflects a broader clemency campaign toward President Donald Trump, as Bankman-Fried continues to support White House policies from prison via posts on X.

Smerconish noted that Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over SBF’s criminal trial and sentenced him to 25 years in prison, is the same federal judge who oversaw E’s civil trial. Jean Carroll v. Trump, a point he said was “not lost” on the family.

When asked what she would say to Trump, Fried called her son “one of the brightest and most talented young men of his generation” and said he would provide “an enormous benefit to the economy” if released.

But that door seems closed, at least for now.

Trump said in an interview with The New York Times in January that he would not consider pardoning Bankman-Fried even though Trump has granted pardons to other crypto figures, including Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.

Polymarket punters give it a 12% chance of happening.

Bankman-Fried’s appeal remains pending, and her request for a new trial is opposed by prosecutors who have rejected her claims of political bias.