Month: December 2025

• 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, jurors saw how he lost a fortune on options trades soon after Netflix wired the cash.

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 — and failed — to stop him, a New York fraud jury heard on Tuesday.

“I can afford to lose the money,” Rinsch said, according to testimony by his former Wells Fargo advisor, Ronald See.

And when the brokerage hit the brakes — limiting him to $250,000 per transaction — the show developer was undaunted.

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.

“They won’t put restrictions on me there,” Rinsch wrote See in a letter shown to jurors.

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 “White Horse,” the 120-minute TV series he’d already spent $44 million of Netflix’s money on. (Rinsch ultimately never finished a single episode of the clones-versus-humans sci-fi thriller.)

Defense lawyers counter that the $11 million was actually Rinsch’s contractually-promised payment for having completed principal photography, and was his money to spend as he pleased.

Either way, testimony on Tuesday by two of Rinsch’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.

The streamer wired Rinsch the $11 million on March 6, 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic halted film production worldwide.

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.)

The director was off to the races again as soon as he switched to Charles Schwab, according to testimony.

“I could send $3 mm personal to get started,” he wrote to his new financial advisor, Adam Checchi, who also testified on Tuesday.

“I understood that to mean three million from his personal funds,” Checchi said under questioning by a federal prosecutor.

Checchi told jurors that Rinsch would soon lose almost $6 million more, mostly on failed, highly risky bets that Gilead’s stock would rise and that the S&P 500 would decline.

“I’m not a broad, diversify kind of guy,” Rinsch explained in a late March 2020 email, adding that he pursues “aggressive” option trading “fully expecting to lose it all.”

Earlier in the day, former Netflix executive Peter Friedlander, who on Monday called Rinch’s project “visionary,” completed a second day of testimony.

On overhead screens, defense attorney Benjamin Zeman showed Friedlander — and the jury — emails from August 2019, in which Rinsch begged for “immediate support” with casting in Brazil.

“Show is set to collapse,” Rinsch wrote.

The defense is blaming the implosion of White Horse on Netflix’s decision to pull support for the project in September 2020.

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’s requests for help.

“His own delays in decisions have caused this,” Friedlander wrote in forwarding Rinsch’s email to Mike Posey, an original series vice president, and others, including production executive Shelley Stevens and Rahul Bansal, an original series director.

Rinsch would continue asking for support — and money — 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.

Rinsch’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.

Just in time for the busy holiday travel season, researchers report on a question that will run through many people’s minds as they cram into tightly packed planes: How clean is airplane air?

To find out, Erica Hartmann, associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University, and her colleagues tested face masks worn by passengers on flights to log what kinds of bugs these products trapped. The team was also interested in the air circulating in hospitals, another public place where germs commonly spread, and tested face masks worn by hospital personnel.

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The team collected 53 masks in sterile bags and cut out the outer layers to analyze just the microbes circulating in the air and not in people’s respiratory passages, then extracted and analyzed DNA from them. To ensure they were detecting all the microbial DNA present, they also used an amplification process called PCR to enrich what was present on the masks.

Overall, they report in the journal Microbiome, they detected 407 microbial species from both the plane and hospital settings, with similar populations of bugs from each. The vast majority of these came from skin and are harmless, says Hartmann. “This is not surprising, because a lot of the microbes in buildings and in the air around us reflect us,” she says. “A lot of the surfaces we touch tend to have skin-associated bugs because we are transferring bugs every time we touch something. We shed microbes everywhere we go—I and my colleagues refer to it as a microbial aura.”

Read More: Are Plastic Cutting Boards Safe?

The kits that the team used to extract the genetic material from the microbes were designed to collect DNA, so that meant the researchers captured primarily bacteria—not viruses, many of which have RNA as their genetic base (such as COVID-19 and influenza). While people might be more concerned about how much virus is floating around a confined space like an aircraft cabin, Hartmann says that viruses are likely to make up a smaller proportion of microbes in the air than bacteria, since people are shedding bacteria from the skin in larger amounts than they are releasing virus particles.

She notes that viruses tend to be very dependent on the right habitat in order to thrive, and once outside the body and away from cells that they can infect, they can become slightly less virulent—although there are plenty of examples of viruses surviving on surfaces, and studies show that it only takes a small amount of virus to infect someone and make them sick.

The results of the study highlight the importance of developing better ways to monitor the air for disease-causing pathogens, including viruses, using filtration and sensing systems that could provide more real-time readings. “Imagine something like a carbon monoxide sense or a gas alarm, that, depending on the levels of microbes present, could automatically increase air exchange rates or alert people to put on masks,” says Hartmann. “Factoring in health and having the capability to make informed decisions about how to protect yourself would be amazing.”

Until then, Hartmann hopes people will remember that as the weather gets colder and more gatherings happen indoors, the air—even in tight places like a plane or hospital—may not be as full of disease-causing germs as we think. The other lesson: face masks are an effective way to protect yourself from pathogens that might be circulating in the air (as well as protecting you from spreading germs to others if you are sick).