Feds charge director with $11 million fraud over his unfinished Netflix show

According to the Times report, Netflix secured the show by offering millions more than Amazon and promising Rinsch, whose only feature film is 47 Ronin, final cut.

The fraud he’s being charged with came into play once he told Netflix he’d need an additional $11 million to finish the show, which was originally called White Horse before it was renamed Conquest. After Netflix sent the money in March of 2020, however, Rinsch allegedly took the money for himself, putting $10.5 million in a brokerage account and losing more than half of it in less than two months while telling Netflix that work on the show was “awesome and moving forward really well.”

He had better luck with the rest of the money, making crypto investments starting in the spring of 2021 that prosecutors say “eventually proved profitable.” However, as detailed by the Times, his behavior became erratic, and after Netflix canceled development in 2021, he sent executives emails claiming he’d found a way to map “the coronavirus signal emanating from within the earth” and told his wife he could predict earthquakes

They made enough money that Rinsch allegedly spent $10 million on himself, including over a million dollars to pay for lawyers to sue Netflix in an attempt to get more money, buy five Rolls-Royces and one Ferrari, and spend nearly a million bucks on two mattresses, bedding, and linens. According to the Times, Rinsch claimed they were props for the show, but a mediator who ruled last year that he owed Netflix $12 million decided none of them were necessary for the production.

White Horse still has not been completed.