At a federal courthouse in Manhattan, a witness was called to the stand.
He was testifying for the prosecution.
The witness, Patrick Vouvour, had been the chief software engineer at a financial aid startup called Frank.
On the stand, he recounted a story from back in 2021.
Frank's founder, a woman named Charlie Javis, was on the precipice of selling her business to JPMorgan Chase.
It would be a big, life-changing deal.
And this witness testified that Javis had an unusual request.
She tells him, I need you to create a synthetic database containing 4 million profiles, essentially artificial data.
That's our colleague, Alexander Saidi.
So how does this engineer testify that he responded to this request?
Well, at first, he says, is this even legal?
And he then says he refused to do it because he wasn't sure it was even legal, what was being asked of him.
In reply, Charlie said to him, don't worry, I don't want to end up in an orange jumpsuit.
It was when the jumpsuit comment happened that it was like, this is a real trial about real crimes.
There are 12 real people sitting here listening and deciding whether or not you're going to really go to jail or not.
And when he said it in front of the jury, you could feel it in the room that the stakes just got a lot higher.
And I'm not trying to be dramatic, it really did feel that way.
This trial, which concluded Friday, exposed not just the actions of Charlie Javis.
It also revealed ignored warnings and lax due diligence at JP Morgan on a deal that CEO Jamie Dimon has called a,
quote, huge mistake.