In this special episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, Megyn talks about Carlos Watson and why he might have been framed for a crime he didn t commit. Megyn and her team try to figure out who the real Carlos Watson is and what happened to him.
00:21:07.000OK, because Aussie did not, in fact, have any business relationship whatsoever with YouTube.
00:21:12.000Watson and Rau agreed agreed that Rau would impersonate a media executive at YouTube in communications
00:21:20.000with Goldman Sachs on January 28th, 2021.
00:21:23.000Rau with Watson's agreement created a fake email address in the name of the media executive.
00:21:28.000That's Alex Piper again, which he used to correspond with representatives of Goldman Sachs.
00:21:32.000On February 2nd, 2021, Rau had a phone call with employees of Goldman Sachs, during which he impersonated said media executive from YouTube,
00:21:42.000using a voice alteration application that he downloaded onto his cellular telephone to mask his voice during the call.
00:23:11.000There's nothing to figure out. You were part of it.
00:23:14.000I immediately called back Goldman. It's wrong. It's heartbreaking.
00:23:20.000I mean, it is wrong. It's not heartbreaking to you.
00:23:23.000Maybe that you got caught and now your whole fraudulent empire is crumbling.
00:23:28.000But that's just a taste of how it went.
00:23:30.000And I must say, though, I am not a fan personally of that anchor.
00:23:34.000He did a very good job in that interview.
00:23:36.000He, as I mentioned, also went on with Craig Melvin over on the Today Show and said,
00:23:42.000Ozzy is restarting. It's we're we're opening back up like seconds after they were shut down because all the employees understood that it was a fraud.
00:23:54.000And here's how we described its quick soundbite. Listen here.
00:23:57.000We're going to open for business. So we're making news today.
00:24:00.000This is our Lazarus moment, if you will. This is our Tylenol moment.
00:24:05.000No, no, actually. And they did try to reopen.
00:24:08.000That would not last. You will not be surprised to hear.
00:24:11.000Now, as I mentioned, he was ultimately charged.
00:24:16.000The feds did step in and they charged him and his two co-conspirators with.
00:25:52.000You don't post a million dollar or one that gets a million views and have under a thousand comments, a couple of fewer than a hundred comments on it.
00:26:06.000And it appears they were doing some sort of a scheme where like the video, their videos would pop up in the background of some site you were visiting and you wouldn't even know it was running.
00:26:16.000And it would count as a view, but it explains the total lack of engagement by the audience because they're not even watching it.
00:26:22.000And that's why nobody knew who Carlos Watson was.
00:26:24.000But he was using this scheme to go to people like Bill Gates and yours truly and say, hey, I have this big YouTube presence.
00:26:31.000Then the more of us who said yes, the more he'd use our names to go get other big name guests and so on and so forth.
00:26:37.000OK, but that that is not all that happened inside of his company.
00:26:42.000Listen to this. The DOJ, OK, talks about in December of 2019.
00:26:51.000This also came up and trial Watson and his co-conspirators.
00:26:55.000Hold on. OK, attempted to induce a bank to lend Aussie money.
00:27:01.000This is before the YouTube thing based on misrepresentations and omissions about Aussie's business.
00:27:07.000Watson and his co-conspirators sought to secure the loan with anticipated revenues from a second season of an Aussie TV show.
00:27:16.000However, the contract between Aussie and the show's cable network for the second season of the show was still under negotiation.
00:27:22.000Courthouse news reports that the channel was the Oprah Winfrey network and the show was, quote, black women own the conversation in which Watson was the host.
00:27:32.000The DOJ alleges that to induce the bank to make this loan sooner, Watson directed Aussie's then chief financial officer, the CFO.
00:27:41.000Tripti Thacker to send the bank a fake signed contract between Aussie and the cable network, which, again, we're assuming is own purporting to be signing him up for the second season.
00:27:55.000So here again, he's going to a bank, trying to get an investment, claiming he had a deal that he did not have.
00:28:00.000But this CFO, unlike his CEO, Samir, the CFO, Tripti Thacker, refused to do it.
00:28:10.000He wanted her to come up with a fake signed contract showing he had this deal secured.
00:28:17.000And she said no. When she said no, Samir, with Carlos Watson's approval reading here, the allegations by the DOJ sent the fake contract to the bank copying Thacker.
00:28:32.000So, in other words, the woman, the CFO said, I'm not doing that shit.
00:28:35.600And Samir and Carlos was like, we're like, we don't need her.
00:28:39.000So they drafted up the fake contract and sent it along and had the the temerity, the stupidity to see see the CFO who had just said, I'm not doing that.
00:28:51.780Going back to the DOJ's allegation later that day, Tripti Thacker emailed Watson and Rao to say she was resigning effective immediately.
00:29:02.300She explained, quote, this is illegal.
00:29:14.920What you see as a measured risk, I see as a felony.
00:29:21.780In subsequent months, Watson and his co-conspirators, again, you're quoting from the DOJ, continued to attempt to induce the bank to lend Aussie several million dollars based on misrepresentations and omissions, including regarding the expected revenue from the second season of the Aussie TV show.
00:29:38.060During these discussions, the bank requested to speak to a representative of the cable network to conceal the lies about Aussie's relationship with the cable network and the status of in terms of their agreements.
00:29:53.480Rao, with Watson's approval, created a fake email address in the name of an actual executive of the cable network, again, which we think is own, which Rao used to impersonate the executive and communicate with the bank about the potential loan.
00:30:23.780And then there's another piece that was brought up about the way they lured in this guy, Brad Bessie, who they wanted to be an executive producer at Aussie.
00:30:37.820And what they told this guy who had been the EP of Entertainment Tonight was, we're going to launch, you're going to be the executive producer of Carlos's new show.
00:30:56.760I am hired as the EP of The Carlos Watson Show, a daily half-hour interview program produced by Aussie, hosted by Watson, and it's going to be in primetime on A&E.
00:31:20.540And when he asked Mr. Watson and Mr. Rao about it, they said the executives wanted to talk only to them.
00:31:25.680And when Mr. Bessie said he knew several A&E executives and would be happy to reach out to them, they told him, maybe not.
00:31:33.140Another warning sign, Mr. Bessie said, was that one of the other producers pointed out that A&E had already scheduled the show Hoarders for the very time slot that was supposedly meant for The Carlos Watson Show.
00:31:47.700Toward the end of July of 2020, Mr. Bessie got in touch himself with an A&E executive to confirm that the channel would indeed broadcast The Carlos Watson Show.
00:31:57.920That is when he learned it would not appear on A&E, he said.
00:32:02.420Mr. Bessie said he resigned when he learned that he'd been lied to.
00:32:06.420And in a farewell email to Watson and Rao, which he shared with The New York Times, he wrote,
00:32:12.020You are playing a dangerous game with the truth.
00:32:15.140The consequences of offering an A&E show to guests when we don't have one to offer are catastrophic for Ozzy and for me.
00:32:29.300So all of this comes to a head this past summer when the U.S. attorney, well, first the U.S. attorney charged him, which happened prior to this summer, and then there was a trial.
00:32:41.700Here is the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, which is Brooklyn, announcing the conviction of Carlos Watson.
00:32:51.440The jury found that Watson was a con man who lied to investors to get them to buy stock in Ozzy Media and to shower him with money to grow the company.
00:33:06.340He was the public face of Ozzy Media with control over every aspect of the company as it grew from an Internet website to an entertainment platform with grand ambitions.
00:33:17.120And while pulling the levers behind the scenes, Watson also had a direct hand in every crime committed by Ozzy Media and its executives as it morphed into a criminal enterprise as they became desperate for cash infusions to fuel Ozzy's growth.
00:33:32.620They alleged at trial that they, by the way, they have a lot of sophisticated investors in Ozzy to Lorraine Powell jobs, of course, because she's never seen a woke project that she doesn't like.
00:33:45.260Carlos wasn't woke on the air, but he was a black man launching a media company that was supposed to be more centrist in its approach.
00:33:51.500And he's seeking out for money in 2020, June of 2020 and so on when it was post George Floyd.
00:33:58.500I mean, people were dying to give Carlos money.
00:34:00.080So in any event, you had at the trial, people like Alex Piper of YouTube testify, the head of Google, Sundar Pichai, can't remember, I don't know if that's how you pronounce it.
00:34:15.300I've only ever seen his last name written.
00:34:18.080They testified for the government saying they never had deals with Ozzy with whom, you know, Carlos was claiming he did have deals.
00:34:25.940And they never considered buying Ozzy at any price, contrary to Watson's claims to investors.
00:34:32.960He had said like Google had considered buying and so on.
00:34:36.580So the prosecutor said that Watson had also assured investors that Ozzy was thriving, even as its cash reserve sank to $19,000 at one point.
00:34:47.400And it was struggling to pay rent, wages and other basic expenses.
00:34:50.420But they still wanted to line their own pockets.
00:34:54.420Carlos gets convicted and now he was facing prison time, my friends, prison time of he, the minimum was two years and the maximum was 29, 29.
00:35:13.640He wanted the minimum, of course, and the government wanted something like 19 years, I think.
00:35:19.760And the sentencing just happened just prior to the sentencing, which was, was it, what was the actual date of the sentencing, sentencing, trying to find out.
00:35:51.460By the way, Sumir, whatever, and the other, another person at Ozzy, they're also facing charges and they testified against Carlos at trial.
00:36:59.960I'm looking at my sought list, but what I want here is the soundbite in which he talks about being a black man and how what's happening to him.
00:37:11.720You and I both know, Angela, that if I were white and I was running a media company that was healthy and hired people and someone in Brooklyn tried to prosecute me, it's like you getting prosecuted, Angela, by Utah.
00:37:58.620That nonsense about Ben Smith, he's got to be in his bonnet about Ben Smith, who did this reporting for The Times, you know, was it BuzzFeed, then went to The Times and now has launched Semaphore.
00:38:09.200We're trying to claim that somehow he had a personal beef against Carlos because, like, at one point BuzzFeed tried to buy Carlos and he wouldn't sell.
00:38:17.560Meanwhile, Ben Smith had been on my show and we interviewed Ben about this.
00:38:21.300And here's what he said, just for the record on it, SOT-62.
00:38:25.280It would not be true that I had offered him money and it's not, you know, he hasn't denied any of the things we reported.
00:38:30.660And I think that's, it's not really, it's not really all that relevant to the story.
00:38:35.000I wasn't, I was not privy to a deal that he was talking about with BuzzFeed around the time I was leaving.
00:39:07.840But you heard that sound, but if I were white and running a media company that was healthy and hired people and someone in Brooklyn tried to prosecute me and then he takes a dodge,
00:39:18.400it's like you, Angela, you know, you're in Brooklyn and somebody tries to prosecute you in some other jurisdiction like Utah.
00:39:35.420You and I both know, Angela, that if I were white and I was running a media company that was healthy and hired people and someone in Brooklyn tried to prosecute me,
00:39:46.980it's like you getting prosecuted, Angela, by Utah.
00:42:50.600By the way, that was a black prosecutor you heard announcing his conviction.
00:42:56.640As I said, really, really focused on his color now.
00:43:02.220So at sentencing, he did the same thing when he got up in front of the judge.
00:43:08.700This was, once again, a big thing that he tried to play about the race card.
00:43:13.800He told the judge that he was a target of selective prosecution as a black entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, where African-American executives have been disproportionately few.
00:43:25.360And he called the case, quote, a modern lynching, a modern lynching.
00:43:32.000So he was sentenced on just this past, like last, last Monday, December 16th, by United States District Judge Eric Comity.
00:43:57.080And he was sentenced to 116 months in prison, almost 10 years.
00:44:06.820He was sentenced to almost 10 years in prison, nine years and eight months.
00:44:13.220I'm like, I'm sorry, I just can't believe that that guy with the YouTube and Samir and Abby and Ozzy Fest and all, like, he's going to jail.
00:45:06.680Before you start to feel sorry for Carlos, which I assume you're not, but he got basically the same time, just a little less than Elizabeth Holmes.
00:45:12.480And the judge understood that comparison and was just fine with it.
00:45:17.260This is what the prosecution said in their sentencing memo, seeking a stiff penalty.
00:45:24.840This case is unusual for the audacity, the pervasiveness and the length of Watson's fraud, as well as for his obstruction, perjury, repeated attacks on the justice system and complete rejection of any responsibility.
00:45:37.360The memo was particularly harsh toward Watson's character.
00:45:40.440Quote, the history and characteristics of the defendant also weigh in favor of a serious sentence.
00:46:00.640There has never been any indication that Watson feels any empathy for any of his victims, people who believed in him, whom he stole from.
00:46:08.140In most cases, a defendant accepts responsibility.
00:46:11.560Watson has done the opposite, not just fighting his case on the merits, as is his right, but taking every opportunity to obstruct, to retaliate, to undermine the justice system and to continue lying and breaking the rules.
00:46:23.960Watson's history and characteristics thus further support a substantial sentence.
00:46:29.960The memo also said that it was fair to compare him to Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes, who received an 11-year and three-month sentence for defrauding investors of over $100 million.
00:46:44.060Although Theranos' product was quite different than Ozzie's, argued the prosecution, the lies that Watson told investors were very similar to those told by Holmes.
00:46:53.040They lied about revenue and contractual relationships to outside investors while silencing or ignoring concerns raised by employees.
00:47:01.500Both sets of founders fully embodied the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach and used it as a justification for their behavior.
00:47:08.100Like Holmes specifically, Watson played up his image as a charismatic founder, drawing investment to his company based on a success story that he knew was not true,
00:47:17.920all while actively courting as much press and personal attention as possible.
00:47:56.380And you're always going to end up being surprised, right?
00:47:59.720Like, you know, and if you stay in it and you're just with the person, they're going to share something that reminds you that most of us are contradictions, right?
00:48:10.940That, um, uh, what did, uh, Dr. King used to, he loved that quote that there was a famous quote that you say, there's enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue, right?
00:48:21.460And I think very few of us are only one thing or the other.
00:48:45.220Even your average rogue doesn't cross.
00:48:48.360Once you behave criminally, after this society has given you every advantage, you've gone to Harvard, you graduated from Stanford Law, where you made the law review, you got onto television, you got hundreds or $800 million of investment from some of the richest Americans alive, believing in you, trying to help you build things like your newsletter, which definitely did not have 20 million subscribers.
00:49:14.840The most successful have maybe 3 million, you, all you should be doing is getting down on your knees and thanking this beautiful country of yours and working hard to earn the respect and the belief in the investment of those people.
00:49:29.460Instead, you tried to short track it, to short change your journey to the top, like neither a gentleman nor your average rogue.
00:49:40.180You know, I think back to my own experience of Carlos Watson and I liked him.
00:49:47.380Like so many others, he fooled me into thinking he's a nice guy.
00:49:50.540And I've told you this, I, I do not have a good, he's actually not a good guy detector.
00:50:13.760Anyway, there's a long list of people who turned out not to be great that I thought kind of might be, who knows who's in my life right now.
00:50:22.260But they say one in four people as a sociopath, one in four, is this one of them?
00:50:27.820No empathy for any of the victims still, as he's caught and he's sentenced and convicted saying, poor me, I feel bad for people, including me.
00:50:38.320Do you know if somebody like that is in your orbit, if you're doing business with them, if they're a friend of yours, if they're a family member, can you really say you don't have a Carlos Watson in your world right now?