Convicted Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli makes surprise appearance at SBF trial

Martin Shkreli, the “Pharma Bro” known for his attention-getting antics, and convicted and imprisoned with federal fraud charges—he’s now out—showed up at Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial on Wednesday, in a somewhat bizarre cameo.

The comparisons between the two are many, from the fraud charges themselves, to the men’s streams of social media posts that were subsequently used against them by prosecutors, to both men’s flouting of rules that got their bail revoked and landed them in jail (Bankman-Fried watched the Super Bowl via a VPN contacted to a potential witness, and gave Caroline Ellison’s private writings to a reporter, while Shkreli encouraged his social-media followers to pluck a hair from Hillary Clinton’s head).

Already, I’d been thinking about the similarities between the cases quite a bit. They’re similar in terms of the defense approaches (Shkreli’s lawyers said he thought he was just moving money around and planned on making customers whole, and Bankman-Fried’s lawyers Wednesday made similar arguments), the notoriety of the defendants, and their online profiles. Shkreli, now out of prison, seems to be trying to reestablish his cultural relevancy with this case, and is commenting on it widely and frequently. 

The last time I wrote about Shkreli was in the Elle magazine piece, “The Journalist and the Pharma Bro,” about a onetime Bloomberg journalist who also covered his case, Christie Smythe. She fell for him and thought the feelings were reciprocated, leading to the breakup of her marriage and her leaving her Bloomberg job. When I requested comment from him for the article, he effectively broke up with her using me as the intermediary.

So it was a little startling to come back into the federal courtroom where I’d spent the morning and see Shkreli in a seat there, watching the proceedings on a small screen. (It’s called an overflow courtroom, and the proceedings from the actual courtroom, which can’t accommodate all the viewers, are streamed in.)  He was attending with crypto influencer Tiffany Fong (who last month handed off to the New York Times a 15,000-word unpublished Twitter thread that Bankman-Fried had given her, and which the Times published an article about).

While Bankman-Fried showed marked self-control at Wednesday’s proceedings—no fidgets, barely even moved—Shkreli looked exactly like he had when I observed him at his own trial. He shifted. He slouched. He scratched. He took notes. He tugged at his hair and made faces (at testimony about “doge currency” and at a cheery booster video from FTX). He shook his head in amusement at a minor prosecution fumble. He read a book when he was bored. Mostly, though, he appeared quite entertained, resting his hand on his chin, smiling, and watching as though he were watching a great episode of a favorite show. When testimony ended for the day, Shkreli stood in line to retrieve his cell phone, and left court, accompanied by Fong, walking into a sunny fall day—while Bankman-Fried would return to jail in Brooklyn for the night.