The Crypto Drama Is Strong in the Sam Bankman-Fried Trial. But There’s Another, Far Weirder Part.

I made peace with the fact that I don’t understand anything about cryptocurrency a long time ago. That isn’t for a lack of trying. Yes, I’ve attempted to parse the insanely outré nuances of the Bitcoin mining economy—those mammoth PC rigs, decompiling millions of übercomplicated mathematical problems in search of an esoteric, intangible digital asset that sweaty weirdos decided to call money. But I come up short every time, and my hesitance proved to be miraculously prudent throughout this past year, after Sam Bankman-Fried—whose dumpy fashion sense and vacuous, dead eyes are singularly representative of the overall Vibes Problem with crypto guys—was arrested for a monumental list of financial crimes committed by his (now defunct) blockchain hedge fund, FTX.

I haven’t been locked in on the specifics of the case, because, again, when I think about crypto for too long, my eyes roll back into my head. Instead, the only way I’ve been participating in this story is through the courtroom sketches emanating out of Manhattan federal court, which, like everything else entangled with the FTX scandal, are both majestic and fucking bizarre. 

Just look at that thing. That’s a depiction of Bankman-Fried’s former girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, who appears to be melting on the stand. She looks like the woman from Edvard Munch’s The Scream if she got caught up in a pump-and-dump scandal. It’s the sort of painting that might make me really scared if I looked at it in the haze of an evening gummy. Why do her eyes seem to follow me around the room? And since when did the state of New York hire the dark-psychedelic version of Salvador Dalí to do its federal portraits?

The answer, apparently, is 1980, for that is when veteran courtroom sketcher Jane Rosenberg started working for the city. She’s been on a real tear lately, as New York billows up with high-profile legal proceedings. (Perhaps you remember her outrageous, Pixar-villain-like illustration of Donald Trump from April, or her sinister, steely-eyed take on Ghislaine Maxwell.) Rosenberg has a background in fine art—you can find her gorgeous nonmunicipal cityscapes of New York on her website—as well as a gallery of her favorite illustrations from the jury box. (Hey look! There’s John Gotti!) Rosenberg claims to be totally nonpartisan in every canvas she files to the judge, and that she’s more than happy to let us come up with our own interpretations of her work. However, as she told InsideHook earlier this year, “If somebody displays emotion, then that’s what I have to try to capture.”

If we take Rosenberg at her word, then that means Ellison might have been showing the genuine physical symptoms of a depressive breakdown on the stand, and considering she has already pleaded guilty to fraud charges, I can’t really blame her for doing so. So maybe we’re better off digesting Rosenberg’s work as a bleeding-edge expression of the Fall of the House Crypto—captured in medias res—much like Goya’s paintings during the Peninsular War. In that sense, we’re living through one of the most fruitful periods of American artistry—everything that emanates out of this courtroom seems to be in conversation with the priceless artifacts of the old masters. As far as I’m concerned, Rosenberg’s FTX movement is right up there with the greatest legal sketches in history.

Let’s break down some of her recent masterpieces:

Here we have Ellison—still very much in a pretzeled, Girl From Scream state—rising out of her seat to point, acrimoniously, toward Bankman-Fried. Is Rosenberg perhaps evoking the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Ellison, as God, reaching down from the heavens to bless SBF with the gift of endlessly self-replicating fake money? Is Bitcoin really just the transubstantiation principle taken to its capitalistic extremes? The Renaissance is back, baby.

I love this. Very postmodern. We have Sam Bankman-Fried (doughy, gray, decomposing in his suit) watching a video of a much healthier and happier version of Sam Bankman-Fried, years before he was under federal investigation. There’s no doubt in my mind that Rosenberg is summoning René Magritte’s subversive classic, The Treachery of Images. This is not a deranged crypto huckster, it is simply a picture of a deranged crypto huckster.

OK, yes, this is just straight-up pop art. Andy Warhol is no longer with us, so he’s unable to be recruited to paint a FTX User Guide instructional DVD in the oversaturated Campbell’s Soup form. We’re lucky that Rosenberg, a New York City legend on par with anyone who passed through The Factory, was willing to step up to the plate instead.

Transcendent stuff. SBF is defeated, in bondage, and rethinking the countless mistakes that got him to this point. Rosenberg, once again, is turning to the 19^th century by referencing the biting emotional tenor of Paul Delaroche, and his caustically satirical portrayal of a sick, cold Napoleon crossing the Alps. No military élan here! Just a man at the end of his rope. (The difference, of course, being that Napoleon was a tactical genius, and Bankman-Fried is a guy who stole untold sums of money from his investors.)

And so on and so forth. The Bankman-Fried trial is scheduled to go on for up to six weeks, which means we’ll certainly get more of Rosenberg’s masterstroke sketches in the future. Could she please give us one that alludes to Saturn Devouring His Son next? Or one of those Bosch hellscapes? SBF getting eaten alive by some sort of horrible bird-monster during cross-examination? That might be the only way I can stay focused on a court case about a crypto firm.