At SXSW Conference, a Mother Presses Her Son’s Case

Among the tech start-ups pitching their ideas at SXSW this week, there was a mother, advocating not a new company but the cause of her son.

Lyn Ulbricht’s son, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested in October and charged with operating the Silk Road, the online drug bazaar where Bitcoin was the only money accepted.

Ms. Ulbricht has been raising money to pay for her’s son’s legal bills, and she thought that the crowd at SXSW would be receptive to Mr. Ulbricht’s cause.

By Monday, she looked tired after making appearances at several Bitcoin-related events. At each appearance, she handed out fliers with the website her family set up, FreeRoss.org, and a QR code that allowed donors to give money immediately.

“I see it as my job to pay the people who can help my son,” she said after the biggest Bitcoin-related panel at SXSW, where she was the first person in line to ask a question and mention her effort to the crowd.

She and her husband, who run a business renting houses in Costa Rica, have made her son’s cause into a nearly full-time job. She says she is taking a class on Twitter and Facebook to learn how to use social media to promote the effort. She had used neither â€" and had not possessed a Bitcoin â€" before her son’s arrest.

“It’s a whole new world for us,” she said.

When she has a chance to make her pitch, Ms. Ulbricht has not been talking about the merit’s of the case. She says she doesn’t know more than what is in the public documents.

But Mr. Ulbricht has pleaded not guilty and Ms. Ulbricht has said she wants people to know him not as an indicted suspect, but as the “wonderful person” she knows. Friends and acquaintances described Mr. Ulbricht in a recent New York Times article as soulful and sensitive.

The biggest deterrent to her efforts, she says, is the government allegations that Mr. Ulbricht solicited several murders for hire. Those charges did not end up as formal charges in the indictment that the government recently filed, and Ms. Ulbricht says she is confident they are not true.

“I kept reading these awful things that don’t sound like him at all,” she said.

She has also been arguing that her son’s case matters more broadly.

“This case opens new legal territory and the government is poised to set Internet and financial law with it,” the website she helped build says. “Bad law could be ushered in and we will be forced to live with it.”

The trip to Austin was a homecoming of sorts for Ms. Ulbricht. She and her husband raised their family in Austin, but they recently moved to New York to be near their son, who is in jail in Brooklyn awaiting trial.

Since she began raising money for her son, the donations have not been pouring in. Ms. Ulbricht says that many people have the perception that her family, or her son, was rich from Silk Road, where the operator collected a commission on each purchase.

But she said that the family did not have enough to pay for the bills, and whatever Bitcoins that Mr. Ulbricht owned when he was arrested are off limits until the case is over.

Ms. Ulbricht said she had not seen a major uptick in donations after attending Texas Bitcoin Conference, which took place last week, and SXSW this week. Only a few people took the fliers she handed out to attendees coming out of the Bitcoin talk on Monday.

But she said she had received moral support from enough people, which she said she told her son about when she spoke with him by phone on Monday.

“No one is going to be mean to me,” she said. “I am a mom who is in a very bad position. At worst case, they just ignore me. But people have been very kind.”