New York (AP) -I have projected Ozy Media for almost ten years a photo of the success of new media.
The company led interviews with big name, an Emmy-winning TV program, aBuzzy Music and Ideas Festivaland impressive figures to show potential investors - toIt implodedIn 2021 in the midst of doubts about the size of the public, the viability and basic integrity.
These doubts are now central to a federal criminal case.Accusations of conspiracy to commit fraud.
Even after several other public and court concerts for Silicon Valley companies that went from Ballyhooed to Belly-Up, it is difficult to forget the moment in Ozy's rise, because co-founder Samir Rao emulated a YouTube director to the company toTalk about potential investors.
Watsons and Ozy's lawyers blame RAO all the incorrect statements to RAO who have argued for conspiracy to commit fraud and commit identity theft.The world where African -American leadersthere have been few disproportionate.
"I am not now and have never been a" scammer, "he said when he was sued last year.
Officers of Justice and Rao, their Starvitne, say that Ozy De Lijn was striping between hopeful hype and bare optical illusion.
"We told so many lies against so many different people," Rao testified after he told how a rich company came up with rosy financial things in a desperate attempt to lure investors and stay in business.
The hope was to "enable a diverse audience to, hopefully to consume a different, more meaningful content," he said.But 'survival within the decency of decency, justice, truth, it transformed to survive at all costs and is needed on everyone."
'The new and the next'
Ozy was founded in 2012 on a millennium-friendly condition for giving a fresh, refined but non-stable acquisition of politics, culture and more in it as "the new and the next" the reinforcement minority and marginalized voices.
A son of two teachers in Zuid-Florida, trained on Harvard and Stanford, had worked on Wall Street, started a test connection company and sold and anchored on MSNBC.Han was conceived by Ozy and was subsequently Rao, a former colleague in the financing world,recruited, after a random meeting in a chipotle restaurant in Silicon Valley, according to Rao.
Ozy debuted with a website, newsletters and a scent: former President Bill Clinton was one of the first interviewees.Network.The annual Ozy Party in New York's central park took big names, ranging from John Legend to a pre-reluctant Joe Biden.
According to testimonials, the company attracted a list of large advertisers, customers and subsidies, but behind the scenes, officers began to bleed money in 2018 and started to try to manage with lies.
'I don't know where his songs came from'
The company told a potential investor that it "ended in 2017 with around.12 million in income", but gave his accounting people some of less than $ 7 million.Under the process.
In the meantime, Ozy often delayed the payment of suppliers and rent, borrowed from future income to make expensive cash progress and struggled to make the payroll, witnessed the former financing vice president Janeen Putere.
The defense portrayed the cash codes as the growth pain of a successful start -up.
"Ozy Media didn't judge her investors or anyone else," said the company's lawyer, Shannon Frison.
Watson Lawyer and Harvard Law School Professor Ronald Sullivan Jr.Zei his client "believed every song he gave every investor."Sullivan suggested that the income figures can vary, depending on whether they take into account nature's income as trade advertisem*nts with a different marketing market.
Poutre testified that auditors rarely agree to counting such income and that she did not feel that Watson was always fair.
"I don't know where his numbers came from. I know where my songs came from," she said.
False e -mail and a speech displacement
The alleged schedules went beyond questionable figures.
While he was trying to get a bank loan in 2020, RAO forced a contract in which he said that Winfrey's own network "Black Women Ewn had renewed the conversation" in a different season.E -mail account for a real director and used it to offer the bank 'background over the transaction'.
Rao told the jury leader that Watson has verbally approved the Charad.Loan or the renewal of the show.
The infamous phone call from RAO came the following year when Ozy was looking for an investment from Wall Street Giant Goldman Sach.He had a YouTube director wrongly claimed on a phone call with them.
But the bankers had service, the real YouTube exec that was quickly found, and Watson told the Goldman Sachs and Ozy board that his co-founder had had a mental breakdown.
The investment was not realized, but Goldman Sachs continued to advertise with Ozy after the episode, RAO said.
Rao told the jury leader that he took antidepressants but had no psychiatric crisis when he called.
"I am a big fan of Carlos, Samir and the show," reads a text that Rao explained as Watson who fed him with a line for his fake persona.Ozy, 'Messages, among other things.
"You are a liar, right?"
Watson's lawyer said that the Ozy founder stumbled about Rao's deception Midtstrøms, was shocked and indicated to keep him along.
The defense has emphasized that RAO was preparing a letter of 2021 - eventually period - and said that the telephone trush was alone.Rao told the jury leader that he wrote to protect the company.
Defense lawyers have thrown him as an incompetent director, known to the manufacturer and admitted that he has given a criminal who wrongly has in the hope of avoiding prison for his own crimes.
"So Mr. Rao, you are a liar, right?"Sullivan asked during a cross -hearing last Friday.
"Unfortunately," replied Rao, "I told many lies in my time at Ozy."
