Director Sentenced to 2.5 Years in Prison for Defrauding Netflix

A filmmaker has been sentenced to 30 months in prison after his conviction in a case involving his personal use of $11 million that Netflix gave him to create a TV series called White Horse. The show never got made. But now the director will face significant jail time as a result of the alleged fraud.

The director is Carl Rinsch, whose best known work is probably his big-budget American film version of 47 Ronin starring Keanu Reeves. According to The New York Times, Netflix funded the series (also called Conquest) from 2018 to 2020. But instead of creating the show, Rinsch “put the money in a personal brokerage account and used it to trade securities instead of putting it toward the production.”

Netflix eventually discovered Rinsch’s actions in early 2021, after he reportedly began sending message to Netflix executives in which he “he claimed to have discovered Covid-19’s secret transmission mechanism and told his wife, a producer on the show, that he could predict earthquakes and lightning strikes.” Later, per the Times, “he went on a spending spree with the show’s remaining production money, speculating on cryptocurrency, living out of five-star hotels in California and Spain and buying five Rolls-Royces and a Ferrari as well as high-end furniture, including a $439,000 handmade mattress.”

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Rinsch could have faced twice as much prison time, but the judge in the case decided on the 30-month sentence after being shown evidence of Rinsch’s mental health issues, along with hearing from character witnesses including Keanu Reeves, who wrote that he believed “circumstances arose where [Rinsch’s] mental health was compromised by misuse of medications and perhaps other issues, which amplified the acts of his self-sabotage and grandiosity, impacting his relationships, work, and ability to complete Conquest.”

Prior to directing 47 Ronin, Rinsch was best known as a commercial director. Conquest was a series about a group of artificial superhumans fighting to stop an apocalypse.

At his sentencing, per Variety, Rinsch told the judge “I made a mistake.”