West Palm Beach, Florida (AP) – President Donald Trump Friday, the conviction of the co-founder of Ozy Media, Carlos Watson, only before Watson had to appear in the prison for a A 10 -year sentence in a financial plot case.
Watson was last year convicted In a closely watched case which presented the implosion of an ambitious startup at a time of agitation in the media industry. On Friday, he was ordered to go to prison.
Watson thanked the president in a statement and criticized the judge who condemned him as “conflictual and contrary to ethics”.
“I am deeply grateful to President Trump to have corrected this serious injustice. His decision reflects his unshakable commitment to equity and justice for those who were wrongly targeted,” said Watson.
Trump aggressively used his presidential power to make sorrows and pardons for people who, according to him, were treated unjustly by the justice system. The president himself was sentenced last year in a case involving Hush monetary payments, part of what he described as a hunt for witches with political motivation against him.
Watson’s switching was part of a Chain of other leniency acts Revealed by the White House on Friday. They understood Trevor Milton, the founder of the electric vehicle company Nikola, who had been sentenced to four years to fraudulently exaggerate the potential of his technology and was pardoned; And three entrepreneurs who founded and helped to manage the Bitmex of the cryptocurrency exchange, which was sentenced to a fine of $ 100 million earlier this year after the prosecutors said that it “voluntarily flouted the American anti-flowage laws to increase income”. They had been sentenced to probation and were also pardoned.
Ozy was founded in 2012 on a premise to provide a fresh, sophisticated but not involved version of politics, culture and even more – was presented as “the news and the next” – while amplifying the minority and the marginalized voices.
He announced that he closed in the fall of 2021 less than a week after a New York Times column has raised questions about the claims of the media organization of millions of viewers and readers while highlighting a potential case of securities fraud.
Watson was arrested in February 2023 after two of the company’s senior executives pleaded guilty of fraud.
Prosecutors said Watson had cheated on investors and lenders by inflating the number of income and suggesting that the agreements were final when they were not. At one point, the co-founder of Watson pretended to be a Youtube executive on a telephone call with potential investors, according to prosecutors.
After the conviction of Watson, the American prosecutor at the time, Breon Peace, said that the jury had determined that “Watson was a crook who had said to lie about lies to deceive investors to buy actions in his business”.
Ozy Media “collapsed under the weight of Watson’s dishonest plans,” said Peace.
But Watson, who is black, called the case “a modern lynching” and argued that he was the victim of “selective prosecution”.
“I made mistakes. I’m very, really sorry that people are injured, including me,” said Watson, but “I don’t think it’s just.”
American district judge Eric Komitee, one appointed by Trump, said during the conviction that “the quantum of dishonesty in this case was exceptional”.
Watson had diplomas from Harvard University and Stanford Law School, worked in Wall Street, had concerts on the antenna in CNN and MSNBC and boasted with entrepreneurial chops. Ozy Media was his second startup, coming a decade after sold a preparation company that he had founded in the twenties.
Ozy, based in Mountain View, California, has produced television shows, newsletters, podcasts and a Festival of music and ideas. Watson hosted several of the television programs, including the “Black Women Winner of the Emmy, who have the conversation”, which appeared on the Oprah Winfrey network.
Ozy hung up big advertisers, customers and subsidies. But under the external signs of success was an overly extensive company that fought – and has dissipated – to remain afloat after 2017, according to the testimony of the initiates.
The company was held to make the pay, ran behind the rent and took cost advances in funding to pay the bills, said the former finance vice-president, Janeen Beam, to the jurors. Meanwhile, Ozy gave potential investors much greater income figures than those he declared to the accountants, according to testimonies and documents.
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The writer Associated Press Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed to this report.
