NEW YORK — Former TV presenter Carlos Watson gave testimony on Monday in the crime trial surrounding the collapse of his Ozy Mediainsisting that he did not plan to deceive the startup’s backers.
“Mr. Watson, did you conspire to commit securities fraud?” asked his lawyer, Ronald Sullivan Jr.
“I didn’t do it,” Watson said, and repeated when asked about the other charges against him, aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Watson, a former news and talk show host on networks including CNN and MSNBC, is the defense’s star witness in the federal trial. He and the now-defunct Ozy are accused of providing lenders and creditors with false financial statistics, forged contracts and other false information that created a glowing picture of a company that was actually in shambles.
This disintegrated in autumn 2021after The New York Times raised questions about claims and practices about Ozy’s audience size, particularly a phone call in which the company’s co-founder, Samir Rao, posed as a YouTube executive to defend Ozy to some investment bankers.
Watson and Ozy Media pleaded not guilty and sought to blame Rao for any false statements. He pleaded guilty, testified against Watson and is awaiting sentencing.
Watson, in his first few hours of testimony, put some distance between himself and Ozy’s rapidly growing financial details. He said that during the early years, he was more focused on the vision and the team than on making sure “every decimal place” was placed correctly.
And he suggested that the revenue numbers recorded in the company’s main financial software program did not reflect all the money coming in.
Prosecutors pointed to differences between these internal records and external presentations to support their claims that Ozy was lying to outsiders about his financial situation. But Watson seemed to suggest that the company’s use of the software was simply a work in progress.
“Like many young companies, it was a bit incomplete. People were doing the best they could,” but some recipes were recorded on other spreadsheets, Watson said.
Affable and engaging, Watson, a graduate of Harvard University and Stanford Law School, had a modest upbringing in Miami and a varied career that ranged from Wall Street to starting and selling a college counseling company to TV. He described brainstorming what Ozy would be with his mother as she battled cancer in 2012.
“As a black kid growing up in the 70s and 80s, you wanted to know that the world would have room for your dreams, your ideas, and your hopes… and I wanted to create the kind of media that elevated that. ,” he told the jurors, who watched intently. Three sat in their seats as they seemed to take careful notes.
Ozy launched a website and newsletters in 2013. The Mountain View, California-based company eventually added TV shows, podcasts and Ozy Festivala festival of music and ideas held annually for several years in New York’s Central Park.
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