Three years of civil litigation, a federal criminal trial, cooperating testimony from two executives, a jury conviction, and a 116-month sentence — and the person who built and directed the Ozy Media fraud spent not one night in prison. That irony forms the backdrop to the final chapter of the SEC’s civil enforcement action against Samir Rao, former COO and co-founder of Ozy Media, Inc., and Suzee Han, the company’s former Chief of Staff.
On March 18, 2026, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York entered final consent judgments against both, resolving the SEC’s litigation as to the two executives who had pleaded guilty, cooperated with federal prosecutors, and testified at the trial of Carlos R. Watson, Jr., Ozy’s CEO and co-founder. Watson was convicted, sentenced to 116 months in federal prison, and then, hours before his scheduled surrender date, had his sentence commuted by President Trump. The SEC dismissed its civil case against Watson and Ozy Media entirely in September 2025.
How Ozy Media Built a Media Brand on Fabricated Revenue and False Partnerships
Ozy Media launched in 2012 as Watson’s second startup venture. Armed with degrees from Harvard and Stanford Law, a stint at Goldman Sachs, and on-air experience at CNN and MSNBC, Watson attracted significant institutional attention. Mountain View, California-based Ozy produced newsletters, television programming, podcasts, and an annual festival in Central Park. It held partnerships with NPR and the Oprah Winfrey Network and hosted figures ranging from Hillary Clinton to Malcolm Gladwell at its OzyFest events. The Emmy-winning show “Black Women OWN the Conversation” aired on OWN. The brand was real. The financial performance behind it was not.
According to the SEC’s complaint, filed February 23, 2023, Watson and his executives routinely presented investors with revenue figures that inflated Ozy’s actual annual income by at least 100 percent, year after year from 2018 through 2020. The fund-raising arsenal included fabricated contracts bearing forged signatures created specifically for investor due diligence, false claims that prominent co-investors were committed to financing rounds that did not exist, and misrepresentations about deals with Oprah Winfrey and Live Nation that were either unfinalized or nonexistent. The company strained to make payroll and relied on costly cash advances to pay basic operating expenses — none of which investors were told.
The Goldman Sachs Call, the YouTube Impersonation, and the Cover Story Watson Offered
The scheme’s most operatically audacious moment arrived in early 2021, when Goldman Sachs was considering a $40 million investment in Ozy. To support false claims that Ozy was generating licensing revenue from YouTube, Rao impersonated a YouTube executive named Alex Piper on a conference call with Goldman Sachs bankers. Watson listened in on the call and texted Rao talking points in real time, prosecutors alleged. Goldman Sachs employees grew suspicious, contacted Google — YouTube’s parent company — confirmed that no YouTube executive had participated, and withdrew from the investment. Google referred the matter to federal law enforcement.
When the prospective investor confronted the company, Watson did not acknowledge the impersonation. He told the investor, and separately told Ozy’s own board of directors, that Rao had experienced a “mental health crisis.” In private, Watson had helped construct the call. The cover story bought Ozy time. A New York Times column by Ben Smith published in September 2021 eventually exposed the Goldman Sachs incident, triggering the collapse of the company, the departure of board chairman and billionaire investor Marc Lasry, and Ozy’s formal shutdown in October 2021 — followed by Watson’s implausible announcement days later that the company would reopen.
How Rao and Han Became the Government’s Witnesses Against the Man They Worked For
Han pleaded guilty on February 14, 2023 to securities fraud conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy, telling a magistrate judge that she had falsified the company’s financial information at the direction of two unidentified executives. Rao pleaded guilty the following week to conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft for the YouTube impersonation. Both were released on bail to await sentencing. Both testified for the prosecution at Watson’s eight-week trial in Brooklyn federal court in the summer of 2024.
Rao testified that he and Watson had manipulated financial data prepared for BuzzFeed’s acquisition discussions, inflating television revenue from $6 million to $8 million and events revenue from $11 million to $15 million across successive drafts of the pitch deck. He described fabricating invoices and adjusting figures to portray the company “in as favorable a manner as Watson deemed necessary.” The jury convicted Watson on July 16, 2024 on all counts. U.S. District Judge Eric Komitee said at sentencing that the “quantum of dishonesty in this case is exceptional” and sentenced Watson to 116 months — nearly ten years — with $96 million in forfeiture and restitution to follow. The judge called the case “a tragedy of Mr. Watson’s own making.”
The Trump Commutation, the Dismissed Civil Case, and What the Final Judgments Actually Imposed
On March 28, 2025, hours before Watson was to surrender to the Federal Correctional Institution in Lompoc, California, the White House announced that President Trump had commuted his sentence. The commutation also eliminated the $96 million in forfeiture and restitution. In September 2025, the SEC dismissed its remaining civil fraud case against both Watson and Ozy Media. The two cooperating witnesses who had testified against him remained in litigation.
The final civil judgments entered March 18, 2026 against Rao and Han permanently enjoin both from violating the antifraud provisions of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and Rule 10b-5. The judgment against Rao also imposes a three-year bar from serving as an officer or director of any public company — reduced from the ten-year bar originally entered in March 2023 in apparent recognition of his cooperation. Civil monetary penalties against both defendants were not specified in the litigation release, with amounts previously designated as subject to court determination.
Conclusion
The civil record against Rao and Han is now closed. Watson’s criminal conviction stands on paper despite the commutation, and his SEC case no longer exists. The investors who funded Ozy on the basis of doubled revenue figures, invented business relationships, and at least one live impersonation of a corporate executive received no disclosed recovery. The cooperating witnesses who brought down the case against their CEO received permanent injunctions. The CEO himself received clemency.
