Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research and ex-girlfriend of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, testified Wednesday that the duo bribed Chinese officials $100 million to regain access to more than $1 billion in frozen cryptocurrency so they could continue their con to cheat investors out of their money. 

Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund Bankman-Fried owned but Ellison ran, had its funds frozen on Chinese crypto exchanges OKX and Huobi. Alameda was told that the funds were part of a money laundering investigation into an individual who had previously traded with Alameda. 

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Ellison testified that she, Bankman-Fried, FTX co-founders Gary Wang and Nishad Singh, FTX Chief Operating Officer Constance Wang, and two other employees held multiple meetings about how to unfreeze the funds. One of the ways included using an employee's father, a Chinese government official, to see if he could use his influence to get it done. When that didn't work, Alameda hired a lawyer to work with the Chinese government, but that too was futile. 

Another idea that was floated was to hire Thai prostitutes and use their accounts to arrange trades with Alameda that they knew would be bad and therefore would transfer value away from Alameda's accounts and to the sex workers, Ellison said. In part two of the plan, Alameda would reclaim the assets from the Thai prostitutes through nonfrozen accounts. Unsurprisingly, the bizarre plan did not work.  

During a brainstorming session, Bankman-Fried told his deputies, including Ellison, to "shut the f*** up" while they tried to find a way to claw themselves out of the Chinese mess. He and his crew of advisers, which included high school friends and a person he met at math camp, eventually decided that bribing officials $100 million in November 2021 should be the way to go.

Ellison told jurors she lied to her employees about the illegal payout because she "didn't want the facts of our crimes to get out."

Ellison is widely considered to be Bankman-Fried's chief accomplice as well as the star witness for the government. She began her testimony on Tuesday in front of a packed room at the federal courthouse in Manhattan. She told jurors that her former boyfriend-boss should be held accountable for the crimes that led to FTX's spectacular implosion.

The defense has already hinted it would go after Ellison, painting her as a deeply insecure woman who wasn't very good at her job, failed to follow instructions, and didn't deserve the massive salary she pulled in.

Following Alameda and FTX's collapse in November, Ellison, a Stanford University graduate with a degree in mathematics, brokered a deal with prosecutors. In exchange for her testimony and cooperation, prosecutors said they would file a letter asking for leniency in her case.

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Bankman-Fried is accused of siphoning billions in customer funds from FTX into Alameda. Prosecutors have also accused him of using some of that money to pay for personal expenses, such as two multimillion-dollar jets, as well as $200 million in real estate, which included a penthouse in the Bahamas he shared with Ellison. He's also accused of making illegal campaign donations to Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill to buy power and influence regulations involving the crypto industry.

If convicted of the seven federal criminal charges against him, the 31-year-old could be looking at what is effectively a life sentence.