The Hollywood filmmaker who is charged with a conspiracy of 11 million US dollars for Netflix

The Ministry of Justice accused Carl Erik Rinsch on Tuesday, which Netflix commissioned for an unprecedented science fiction series.

According to the indictment, which was announced by prosecutors for the southern district of New York and the New York field office of the Bundesburos für Investigation, Mr. Rinsch secured financing from streaming company from 2018 to early 2020. But he launched the money into a personal broker account and used it home to exchange securities instead of putting them on the series.

The federal prosecutor accused Mr. Rinsch, who was arrested on Tuesday in West Hollywood, California, with wire fraud, money laundering and money transactions that come from illegal activities.

Netflix is ​​not specified by name in the indictment. However, the company was involved in public disputes about the planned series of the filmmaker, which was originally called “White Horse”, but was renamed “conquest”. Last year, a referee decided that Mr. Rinsch owed almost $ 12 million dollars to pay compensation and legal fees.

“Carl Rinsch has supposedly stolen more than 11 million US dollars from a prominent streaming platform to finance wasteful purchases and personal investments instead of completing a promised television series,” said Leslie Backschies, deputy director of FBI, in a statement.

The New York Times treated the dispute between Mr. Rinsch and the streaming giant in 2023. He had sold Netflix the television program near the highlight of the streaming boom a few years earlier. But Netflix canceled the development of the show in early 2021 after Mr. Rinsch’s behavior had become unpredictable. In texts and emails to Netflix executives, he claimed to have discovered the secret transmission mechanism of Covid-19 and told his wife, a producer on the show that he could predict earthquake and lightning strikes.

After Netflix had told Mr. Rinsch that it had decided to end the financing of the “conquest”, he went with the remaining production money of the show in California and Spain and bought a fleet of luxury cars and high-end furniture. He said the cars and furniture were props for the show, but referee Rita Miller, a former judge of the Los Angeles Court of Justice, decided that none of the purchases was necessary for production.

He never produced episodes of the series, and Netflix had to write off the 55 million US dollars that it spent on the project.