{"id":40056,"date":"2025-12-04T04:51:51","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T04:51:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/jury-hears-how-netflix-director-lost-a-fortune-on-options-trades-days-after-streamer-sent-him-11m-for-visionary-show\/"},"modified":"2025-12-04T04:51:51","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T04:51:51","slug":"jury-hears-how-netflix-director-lost-a-fortune-on-options-trades-days-after-streamer-sent-him-11m-for-visionary-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/jury-hears-how-netflix-director-lost-a-fortune-on-options-trades-days-after-streamer-sent-him-11m-for-visionary-show\/","title":{"rendered":"Jury hears how Netflix director lost a fortune on options trades &mdash; days after streamer sent him $11M for &#8216;visionary&#8217; show"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6930a96871107c9f3457487f?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Director Carl Erik Rinsch at a 2015 event in Los Angeles.\"\/><figcaption>Director Carl Erik Rinsch at a 2015 event in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n<p>John Sciulli\/Getty Images for Team One, Saatchi LA<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Director Carl Erik Rinsch is on trial in NY, fighting charges he scammed Netflix out of $11 million.<\/li>\n<li>Prosecutors say Rinsch blew money meant for his sci-fi series on luxuries and playing the market.<\/li>\n<li>On Tuesday, jurors saw how he lost a fortune on options trades soon after Netflix wired the cash.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Director Carl Eric Rinsch made so many failed, seven-figure option bets after Netflix wired him $11 million that his broker at Wells Fargo tried \u2014 and failed \u2014 to stop him, a New York fraud jury heard on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I can afford to lose the money,&quot; Rinsch said, according to testimony by his former Wells Fargo advisor, Ronald See.<\/p>\n<p>And when the brokerage hit the brakes \u2014 limiting him to $250,000 per transaction \u2014 the show developer was undaunted.<\/p>\n<p>On March 30, 2019, just three weeks after receiving the $11 million, Rinsch instructed See, of Wells Fargo Advisors, to wire his remaining $8.5 million to Citibank so he could establish a new brokerage account with Charles Schwab.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;They won&#039;t put restrictions on me there,&quot; Rinsch wrote See in a letter shown to jurors.<\/p>\n<p>Rinsch, 48, is on trial in federal court in Manhattan, fighting charges that he had no right to use the $11 million Netflix sent him on anything other than &quot;White Horse,&quot; the 120-minute TV series he&#039;d already spent $44 million of Netflix&#039;s money on. (Rinsch ultimately never finished a single episode of the clones-versus-humans sci-fi thriller.)<\/p>\n<p>Defense lawyers counter that the $11 million was actually Rinsch&#039;s contractually-promised payment for having completed principal photography, and was his money to spend as he pleased.<\/p>\n<p>Either way, testimony on Tuesday by two of Rinsch&#039;s former financial advisors showed that he was eager to spend the cash prosecutors say the director had quickly moved into his Wells Fargo account. <\/p>\n<p>The streamer wired Rinsch the $11 million on March 6, 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic halted film production worldwide.<\/p>\n<p>Over the next three weeks, he then lost some $5.8 million, almost all of it on highly risky options trades involving Gilead Sciences, which was developing COVID-19 treatment drugs. (See would earn a $22,000 fee on these losses, the defense pointed out on cross-examination.)<\/p>\n<p>The director was off to the races again as soon as he switched to Charles Schwab, according to testimony.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I could send $3 mm personal to get started,&quot; he wrote to his new financial advisor, Adam Checchi, who also testified on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I understood that to mean three million from his personal funds,&quot; Checchi said under questioning by a federal prosecutor.<\/p>\n<p>Checchi told jurors that Rinsch would soon lose almost $6 million more, mostly on failed, highly risky bets that Gilead&#039;s stock would rise and that the S&amp;P 500 would decline.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I&#039;m not a broad, diversify kind of guy,&quot; Rinsch explained in a late March 2020 email, adding that he pursues &quot;aggressive&quot; option trading &quot;fully expecting to lose it all.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Earlier in the day, former Netflix executive Peter Friedlander, who on Monday called Rinch&#039;s project &quot;visionary,&quot; completed a second day of testimony.<\/p>\n<p>On overhead screens, defense attorney Benjamin Zeman showed Friedlander \u2014 and the jury \u2014 emails from August 2019, in which Rinsch begged for &quot;immediate support&quot; with casting in Brazil.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Show is set to collapse,&quot; Rinsch wrote.<\/p>\n<p>The defense is blaming the implosion of White Horse on Netflix&#039;s decision to pull support for the project in September 2020.<\/p>\n<p>In the email chain projected throughout the courtroom on Tuesday, Zeman attempted to show jurors that a year earlier, Friedlander was already cold toward the show developer&#039;s requests for help. <\/p>\n<p>&quot;His own delays in decisions have caused this,&quot; Friedlander wrote in forwarding Rinsch&#039;s email to Mike Posey, an original series vice president, and others, including production executive Shelley Stevens and Rahul Bansal, an original series director.<\/p>\n<p>Rinsch would continue asking for support \u2014 and money \u2014 for another six months before Netflix forwarded the $11 million payment at the center of the trial. The project was ultimately written off by Netflix as a tax loss eight months later, in November 2020.<\/p>\n<p>Rinsch&#039;s trial is expected to continue through next week. He faces up to 90 years in prison if convicted of wire fraud, money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Director Carl Erik Rinsch at a 2015 event in Los Angeles. John Sciulli\/Getty Images for Team One, Saatchi LA Director Carl Erik Rinsch is on trial in NY, fighting charges he scammed Netflix out of $11 million. Prosecutors say Rinsch blew money meant for his sci-fi series on luxuries and playing the market. On Tuesday, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40057,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-40056","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}