On a Friday morning in December, I found myself sitting on a bench outside a federal courtroom in Brooklyn. I was attending the sentencing of Carlos Watson, my former employer at Ozy Media from 2018 to 2020, because a curiosity had gnawed at me: Would he express remorse? What would he have to say for himself?
Watson had been found guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and aggravated identity theft by a federal jury in July. Now was time for his sentencing. I had experienced how disorienting it was to work for someone who routinely bent reality to match his will and beliefs. I was curious how it might feel watching Watson finally be forced to adhere to a judge’s reality and a jury’s findings—and potentially confront the consequences.
I was grasping for some closure. About a month after college graduation, I moved to California for an internship with Ozy at age 22. I desperately wanted to be a journalist, and Ozy was telling the kinds of stories I was drawn to: ambitious, purpose-driven stories about people and trends often not reflected in mainstream media. I was a believer in how journalism could benefit the world, and it seemed that my goals aligned with Ozy’s mission.
There were clear selling points: I built a portfolio of clips and reported on topics I cared about. The small staff size enabled me to take reporting trips and access opportunities I would not have gotten in more established newsrooms. I worked alongside kind, talented editors interested in developing my skills, with many rank-and-file colleagues who were earnest and hardworking. Still, it was hard to shake the feeling that something was amiss.
The chaos within the Mountain View office, where Watson and co-founder Samir Rao worked with roughly 20 of us, was always reverberating. Several times in response to a knock at the door, Watson was served legal papers. A revolving door of CFOs and CMOs cycled through the company; there was a turnover of nearly 50 employees throughout my first year. Early on, it became clear Ozy wrote its own rules: When negotiating my offer, I brought up overtime pay to the pseudo-HR figure. My fellowship salary qualified me for overtime pay in California by law, but I was essentially told something to the effect of We don’t do that here.
It wasn’t long before an office culture defined by hypervigilance, paranoia, and micromanagement started to weigh on me. Unquestioning loyalty was rewarded under the guise of ambition. I also felt a sense of unrelenting urgency, as though each day were mission-critical to Ozy’s existence and any misstep would prove catastrophic. I didn’t understand why our managers wanted to know where employees were at all times. It wasn’t out of character that my manager probed as to why I had a medical appointment.
Ozy hired a lot of young staff, and we were repeatedly told this environment was normal for startups and media. When I was eventually laid off during the pandemic, I experienced an illustrative parting of ways: I was booted from my layoff meeting midway because my Ozy email was deactivated during the call. Rao had to phone my cell to finish laying me off.
More than four years later, I can revisit these memories knowing that Watson and Rao had already dug themselves deep into a hole. I didn’t expect to see a profoundly changed man in the courtroom, but I did wonder if Watson would appear at all humbled. I wondered if he’d acknowledge culpability to minimize his sentence or address how his actions had affected other people. But through his courtroom performance, I saw the same win-at-all-costs playbook on display.
When the sentencing proceedings began, I listened as Watson’s attorney, Andrew Frisch, said he was unprepared to participate and needed more time. In response to question after question from U.S. District Judge Eric Komitee, Frisch cited his own unpreparedness and abstained from participating in the proceeding in an effort to delay Watson’s sentencing, in a manner the judge later called a show of “gamesmanship.” Anyone who’s worked for Watson would laugh to hear that at one point, his defense team proposed postponing the proceeding to next week and suggested the judge not take time off from work as planned to accommodate this.
I listened to federal prosecutors recount retaliatory tactics Watson had employed throughout the case. Ozy had been financially supporting Rao’s legal fees while he was under investigation, but once Watson learned Rao was cooperating with the government, he revoked the company’s financial support, prosecutors said.
I was reminded of how quickly things had turned against me. About a year-and-a-half after I left Ozy and a few days before Ben Smith’s first New York Times story on the alleged identity theft incident was published, someone connected to Watson reached out to one of my family members to accuse me of leaking information to Smith, which I did not do. I had no knowledge of the forthcoming story.
On the second day of sentencing, Judge Komitee found Watson had perjured himself and obstructed justice by withholding culpatory documents and ordering a subordinate to alter Ozy’s books. Judge Komitee emphasized how Watson's “brazenness” distinguished this case from others before sentencing Watson to nearly 10 years in prison, which he is expected to begin on March 28. (Update: President Trump commuted Watson's sentence just hours before he was due to report to prison.) Watson has denied the charges and vowed to appeal.
This “brazenness” revealed itself at every turn. I listened as Judge Komitee recounted how security guards caught Watson repeatedly trying to sneak a cell phone into the courtroom during trial. Watson told security he didn’t believe it counted as a phone because it lacked data access, the judge said. He said Watson also tried arguing he was entitled to the phone because he was trained as a lawyer. During Watson’s statement, he compared his plight to that of Nelson Mandela’s.
During the sentencing, Judge Komitee spoke about how the victims of Watson’s white-collar crimes are investors and banks—which is true. But what’s less often recognized is how he also victimized the people who worked for him.
In what I found to be the most emotional part of the sentencing, prosecutors highlighted how Watson had “personally attack[ed] ... people who toiled under him” throughout the trial and leveraged his power over employees. Referencing various testimonies, they characterized Watson’s relationships as “predatory.” All these years later, I was surprised by how validating these words felt to hear.
Ozy hired many young people, women, and people of color who were hungry to work in media and who were committed to the vision Watson said he represented. It felt like the leaders leveraged the passion of its workforce and the dwindling opportunities in media to convince us that we had nowhere else to go—that my coworkers and I wouldn’t be able to pursue this kind of work anywhere else if we dared to leave.
Many of my colleagues left journalism after working for Ozy. Some were worn down by the manipulative environment and ethical compromises required to keep working there, others by the overwork that led staff to experience illness and mental breakdowns. It’s easy for these more human consequences to get lost in the telling of Ozy’s story, which has always been defined by the shock factor of Watson’s crimes and erratic behavior.
Much has been reported on Watson’s fraudulent business practices, and rightfully so; yet bullying and intimidating your workforce isn’t the kind of thing people are often punished by law for. Defrauding investors can lead to jail time. But derailing the careers, livelihoods, and the wellbeing of dozens of employees—whose chief mistake was getting hired by the wrong place at the wrong time—isn’t a crime. There will be no reparations for that harm.
I was reminded of Watson’s influence when I heard his voice down the courtroom hallway, a few feet away. I was terrified to lock eyes. My heart raced as my body remembered what it felt like to be in his orbit, yoked to the rollercoaster of his whims. I also remembered how bewildering it was to hold that fear alongside the times Watson presented as charming and warm, charismatic and inspirational. This dissonance can make you question your grasp on reality, as anyone who’s been in a toxic workplace or relationship knows.
During his statement, Watson stated that he was “unequivocally saying I made mistakes” and added that he was sorry for the people he hurt. This was the extent of his remorse, but it was more than I’d heard him admit to before.
There is one thing on which I can agree with Watson and his defense team. “Ozy was real,” Frisch said during the sentencing hearing. Watson echoed this sentiment during his statement, noting that unlike other Silicon Valley tales, this wasn’t a case of fake blood products or emission-free trucks. We put high-quality stories into the world that were real, even if the revenue and audience numbers management touted were not.
Frisch was speaking in the past tense, of course. Watson and Rao’s financial claims were vapor, and so the fruits of our labor were vaporized as collateral. The stories we reported for Ozy no longer exist on the internet, which brings a disorienting sense of erasure. A colleague once likened the company’s collapse to witnessing the destruction of a house you built with your own two hands.
Some of my former colleagues might prefer for any trace of the house to go away, which I understand. There are times when I never want to be associated with this experience again, when I would rinse those memories from my mind if I could. But I also want people to remember that it wasn’t just bankers and investors who paid the price for Watson and Rao’s misdeeds. I want to acknowledge how many journalists and workers were chewed up by Watson’s scheme. This is when I wish remnants of Ozy still existed, if only to point and say, “That was real, and that happened to me.”
