SBF’s parents tell CNN that no client money was lost. FTX’s creditors see it differently.

Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, the parents of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted after the exchange collapsed, used their first televised interview to challenge the central premise of his conviction, arguing that ultimately no client’s money was lost.

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

The moment is not coincidental. At the end of March, the FTX Recovery Trust will distribute around $2.2 billion in its fourth installment, bringing total recoveries to approximately $10 billion. Several classes of US customers will reach 100% recovery, and one class will reach 120%. For Bankman-Fried’s parents, these figures should mean exoneration from SBF.

“Everyone has been compensated with 18 to 43 percent interest,” Fried said.

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

Bitcoin has been on a rollercoaster ride since then, soaring to over $126,000 during the fall of 2025, and is now trading around $69,000, well above its late-2022 price.

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

FTX creditors’ representative Sunil Kavuri publicly rejected the framework, writing that “FTX creditors are not complete.”

Parents’ advocacy 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.

“Alameda borrowed them from FTX,” he said. “Alameda acted like everyone else, putting in money and borrowing money.”

If accepted, that argument would normalize the commingling of client assets with one’s own trading company, the exact practice now prohibited by new rules in Hong Kong, the EU and proposed US legislation. The logic that exonerates Bankman-Fried is the same logic that regulators wanted to eliminate.

Fried went further, calling the accusation “essentially political” and arguing that the Biden administration “had decided to destroy cryptocurrencies.”

The political framework reflects a broader push for clemency toward President Donald Trump, as Bankman-Fried continues to support White House policy from prison through posts on X.

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

Asked what he would say to Trump, Fried called his son “one of the brightest, most talented young people of his generation” and said he would be “a huge benefit to the economy” if he were released.

But that door seems closed, at least for now.

Trump said in a January interview with the New York Times that he would not consider a pardon for Bankman-Fried even as Trump has granted clemency to other crypto figures, including Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.

Polymarket bettors give a 12% chance of this happening.

Bankman-Fried’s appeal remains pending and her motion for a new trial faces opposition from prosecutors who have dismissed her accusations of political bias.