Netflix Gave Him $11 Million to Finish a Show. He Bought Five Rolls-Royces Instead

Carl Rinsch had a deal with Netflix. Eleven million dollars to finish a science fiction series called White Horse. Instead he took that money and went on one of the more spectacular spending sprees in recent Hollywood memory — and on Monday a federal judge sentenced him to 30 months in prison for it.

The full accounting of what Rinsch actually did with the money is something else. At least $3.3 million went toward furniture, antiques, and mattresses. A Swiss watch ran him $387,000. He bought five Rolls-Royces and a red Ferrari — that's $2.4 million just in cars. Another $1.7 million went to credit card bills. And somewhere in between he made risky bets on speculative stock options and cryptocurrency.

White Horse was never finished.

"Carl Erik Rinsch orchestrated a scheme to steal millions by seeking $11 million from a subscription streaming service, falsely claiming that money would be used to finance a television show," said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton. "Today's sentence sends a deterrent message: fraud will not be tolerated."

Rinsch was convicted of one count of wire fraud, one count of money laundering, and five counts of engaging in monetary transactions derived from unlawful activity. Beyond the 30-month prison sentence he was hit with three years of supervised release, $11 million in forfeiture, and $700 in mandatory special assessments.

Prosecutors had pushed for five years. His defense argued his behavior stemmed from mental health struggles — that he failed to "recognize the danger of the state I was in."

Keanu Reeves Wrote the Judge a Letter

Before sentencing, Keanu Reeves — who worked with Rinsch on the 2013 film 47 Ronin — wrote a personal letter to Judge Jed S. Rakoff asking for leniency. Reeves had a real connection to the project, having reportedly invested in White Horse himself and served as a producer on it. He even reportedly joined a behavioral health consultant to stage an intervention at Rinsch's Los Angeles home as the situation deteriorated.

The letter was careful and measured. Reeves made clear he didn't know the details of the legal case and wasn't offering excuses — just context.

"I do not know the details of this case. But based upon what I do know about Carl, I did want to take the opportunity to write on his behalf, in the hope that his sentence might be tempered with measures of leniency and mercy as well as justice," Reeves wrote. "In my opinion, Carl is an exceptional artist, and White Horse, in the form in which I saw it, was a superb and visionary work of art, although unfinished."

He also offered what amounted to a quiet character observation — that Rinsch had a pattern of self-sabotage, of expanding the scope of things beyond what had been negotiated and putting himself at odds with the people around him. "I do not intend to share this as an excuse or diminishment of what he has been found to have done, but offer this solely as perhaps an insight into why," Reeves concluded.

What This Says About the Streaming Era

Rinsch's case sits at the intersection of two things that defined the peak streaming era — enormous sums of money being handed to creative talent with relatively limited oversight, and the collision between Hollywood deal-making and the get-rich-quick culture of crypto and speculative trading.

Netflix and other streaming platforms spent aggressively throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s signing deals, funding projects, and distributing money at a scale that the traditional film and television industry had never seen. Most of that money was spent on actual content. Some of it ended up in situations like this one — where the gap between signing a deal and delivering a show turned into an opportunity for someone in financial or psychological freefall to make catastrophic decisions with other people's money.

The $11 million Netflix handed Rinsch was meant to complete a project that apparently showed real promise — Reeves called it "superb and visionary." Instead it bought mattresses, Swiss watches, and a fleet of luxury cars that nobody making a television show actually needed.

Thirty months. Eleven million dollars. Five Rolls-Royces. Not a single episode delivered.

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