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It’s easy to look at the criminal case against Carl Rinsch in New York and marvel at the audacity of it all. In 2018, the writer-director secured $55 million from Netflix for a series called Conquest, and then allegedly blew a large portion of the budget on Rolls-Royces, a Ferrari, a smattering of real estate, speculative crypto bets, and even divorce lawyers. When federal authorities unsealed fraud charges back in March, the reaction was a knowing chuckle. Hollywood, after all, has never lacked for audacious grifters.
And yet the case is not quite so straightforward. Yes, it’s difficult to fathom why Rinsch thought a million-dollar splurge on luxury bedding advanced his creative vision. But Conquest (originally titled White Horse) wasn’t some imaginary bauble. Rinsch had credible investors, including Keanu Reeves, whom he befriended after directing 47 Ronin for Universal. And Rinsch had already spent years globe-trotting to film his saga of A.I. clones hiding in plain sight. When Netflix finally wrote off what was supposed to be a sci-fi tentpole, Rinsch hauled the company into arbitration, accusing it of breaching his contract. (With what money did he litigate, you ask? Netflix’s, naturally. And no, he wasn’t supposed to do that.)
Patty Glaser, one of Hollywood’s most formidable litigators, gamely argued that Rinsch had “final cut” and was therefore entitled to deliver only half the story, with the remainder deferred to a second season. Predictably, however, he lost. The arbitrator was unmoved, citing his lavish spending, Netflix’s increasingly desperate interventions, and Rinsch’s peculiar behavior. According to the divorce case brought by his wife, it was around this time that Rinsch claimed to have uncovered secret knowledge about Covid transmission and electromagnetism.
Sure, Rinsch was irresponsible and eccentric, and had lost his partners tons of money. But he didn’t quite fit the mold of Hollywood frauds: No ersatz producers peddling phantom financing, or Ponzi artists luring gullible millionaires, or even charlatans juicing budgets to milk tax credits. In arbitration, Netflix never even leveled a fraud claim (although it did wish to claw back some of its funding).
So why are federal prosecutors in New York pressing a criminal case? That’s part of what makes this Rinsch disaster so extraordinary. Indeed, productions sometimes collapse, and the detritus often washes up in arbitration or civil court. Rarely, though, does it metamorphose into a criminal prosecution with the showrunner facing up to 90 years in prison.
The Carreyrou Story
A few weeks ago, Rinsch shuffled into a Manhattan courtroom, courtesy of the American taxpayer. He is, by all accounts, now broke. So the government picked up the tab to shuttle him cross-country for a perfunctory hearing before flying him back to Los Angeles. His public defenders, understandably, were wondering why any of this was happening in New York. In a recent motion to dismiss, or at least change venue, they noted dryly: “Aside from the fact that the saga of White Horse’s beleaguered production was publicized in The New York Times, it is inconceivable why the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York is prosecuting this case at all.”
Ah, but that 2023 New York Times story was no ordinary feature. “The Strange $55 Million Saga of a Netflix Series You’ll Never See,” was written by John Carreyrou, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who exposed Theranos and helped send Elizabeth Holmes to prison. When Carreyrou drops a blockbuster story, people in high places tend to notice. And sure enough, after his piece landed, the F.B.I. applied for a warrant to rifle through Rinsch’s email. The case is now being handled by the Southern District’s Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit, a prosecutorial shop that specializes in offshore asset-hiding and market manipulation—and, especially, cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes. In Rinsch, they saw a whale.
Carreyrou’s article painted a vivid tableau of Netflix’s streaming boom hubris. Cindy Holland, then the company’s vice president of original content and now at Paramount, beat out HBO and Amazon in 2018 by writing Rinsch a fat check and handing him final cut. By then, Rinsch had already shot six episodes with funding from Reeves and 30West, backed by Texas billionaire Dan Friedkin. He had reels to screen and a script in hand—and, less reassuringly, a history of disputes, including with 30West. Netflix waved off the red flags.
The alarm bells, however, only grew louder. On shoots in Brazil and Budapest, Rinsch’s conduct turned erratic. He flooded Holland with bizarre doodles via text, told his then-wife and producing partner, Gaby Rosés Bentancor, that airplanes were “organic, intelligent forces” and that he could predict lightning strikes. He demanded more funds. Crew members allegedly whispered about his amphetamine use. Bentancor urged him into rehab. Eventually, Netflix saw no way forward with the production. Holland exited the company, other executives began receiving menacing emails (they consulted the Los Angeles Police Department at one point), and then there was the spending spree—which Rinsch later tried, unconvincingly, to claim was all part of the production.
Carreyrou’s narrative cut off before the arbitrator made her decision: an 80-page ruling, in May 2024, that parsed Reeves’s texts and Netflix executives’ testimony, and ultimately ordered Rinsch to pay $8.78 million for breach of contract. Still represented by Glaser, he tried to get a Los Angeles judge to vacate the decision, claiming that the arbitrator showed bias against him because of his autism. Last November, that court swatted that effort aside, and Glaser withdrew. Netflix, which was owed more than $12 million (including legal fees), subsequently turned up the heat—hiring private investigators, slapping liens on assets, and moving to interrogate Rinsch as a debtor. That’s when prosecutors dropped the hammer. Whether Netflix had any hand in nudging them along, the company won’t say.
The Psychotic Defense
Prosecutors are now facing a volley of defense motions, ranging from the fanciful to the genuinely intriguing. On the more quixotic end, Rinsch’s legal team, now led by Daniel McGuinness, is challenging 18 U.S.C. § 1957—the statute that makes it a crime to move dirty money through financial transactions—arguing it is unconstitutionally vague and offends basic due process. In their telling, the law could just as easily ensnare a Goldman Sachs executive who once bought Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse, should the property ever change hands again. The aim here is clear: to short-circuit the government’s argument that Rinsch committed financial crimes simply by shuttling Netflix’s millions between his own accounts.
I’m not especially impressed with that maneuver, which reminds me of Sam Bankman-Fried’s unsuccessful efforts to sell a judge and jury on the complexity of crypto and his Anthropic investment. But I do think a separate motion, aimed at forcing prosecutors to sharpen their fraud allegations, is worth watching. As the defense puts it: “The government accuses Carl Rinsch of perpetrating a protracted fraud on the streaming giant Netflix by misrepresenting how certain funds … would be used. Yet despite alleging negotiations … the indictment fails to identify any material misrepresentation that Mr. Rinsch made with the specific intent to fraudulently induce Netflix to provide this money. The only specific communication the indictment does allege was sent well after Netflix provided the funds at issue.”
In other words: Did Rinsch set out to dupe Netflix, or did he intend to make a series before his mind splintered and the money went elsewhere? His lawyers, for their part, intend to call Dr. John Mariani, who will testify that Rinsch suffered from a psychotic disorder worsened by prescription stimulants and the Covid shutdowns. Prosecutors will almost certainly counter with their own psychiatric expert, and they’ll need to show not just mismanagement, but deliberate deception—willful concealment of losses and a pattern of spending that only ever enriched himself. This is no slam dunk in either direction.
The timing, too, is telling. Rinsch was charged at a moment of extraordinary tumult inside the Southern District—just after Donald Trump’s takeover of the Justice Department and an interagency fight over dropping the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Just a week before Rinsch’s indictment, Katherine Reilly departed as chief of the Complex Frauds Unit. A few months later, Main Justice circulated a memo cautioning prosecutors not to overreach in white-collar cases, warning against punishing “risk-taking” or stifling “innovation.”
So where does the Rinsch case fit? Was it a relic of the old approach to white-collar enforcement, or a harbinger of the new one? Hard to say. But if this one doesn’t end in a plea bargain, I’ll be watching it with the same fervor as I would a series about A.I. clones banished to a dystopian colony. The government will soon respond to Rinsch’s motions, and what they say may point to how prosecutors plan to police Hollywood’s next wave of financial fantasy.