After just a few hours of deliberation, a New York jury has found Carl Rinsch guilty of scamming Netflix out of over $11 million over a never finished sci-fi series.
With the 47 Ronin director’s fraud and money laundering trial last just under two weeks, Rinsch was in the federal courtroom in Manhattan when the verdict was read out. Under the charges from the U.S. Attorney’s office of the Southern District of New York, Rinsch faces up to 90 years behind bars for wire fraud and more, but the erratic filmmaker will undoubtedly receive a sentence of far less from Judge Jed Rakoff.
Government prosecutors stated in their indictment of earlier this year that Rinsch “knowingly having
devised and intending to devise a scheme and artifice to defraud, and for obtaining money and
property by means of false and fraudulent pretenses.”
Taking the rare defendant move of testifying on his own behalf during the sometimes bizarre trial, Rinsch had entered a not guilty plea and insisted the millions he got from Netflix, on top of the tens of millions he had already received for never completed and ballooning android drama White Horse/Conquest, was to pay off money of his own he’d put into the project. Vouched for in part by 47 Ronin star Keanu Reeves going into the making of the ambitious White Horse, Rinsch told the court he was using some of the material he had already shot for leverage for a second season from the streamer.
Clearly, in a trial that saw former Netflix exec and now Paramount streaming exec Cindy Holland as well as her old colleague Peter Friedlander take the stand too, the jury didn’t buy it.
In full, Rinsch was charged this past spring “with one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; one count of money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; and five counts of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison,” according to the indictment from the SDNY.
Out on a $100,000 bond posted quickly after the Department of Justice indictment came down in March, the self-declared “no income” director is also fighting an arbitration ruling against him to pay back the Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters-run streamer the big bucks he blew on cars, stocks, a lot of food deliveries and more.
Netflix had no comment today when contacted by Deadline over the jury’s verdict.
Harking back to an era that now feels as long ago as the Roman Empire, Holland snatched White Horse, later renamed Conquest, from Amazon in 2018 for over $61 million. Burning through $44 million of then big spender Netflix’s dough and holding final-cut power, Rinsch demanded that another $11 million from the company in 2020 for what he termed as various and pre-and post-production needs to complete the series.
In 2021, with absolutely nothing to show for its investment but a few teaser clips, Netflix pulled the plug on White Horse/Conquest .The company then wrote off over $55 million in costs. Following that, Netflix won a $12 million arbitration ruling against Rinsch in 2024 after the filmmaker claimed that the company actually owed him $14 million. He still hasn’t given Netflix a dime, as was made evident in his trial.
