Welcome to the DOJ Funhouse.
Bernhard Fritsch built a platform—StarClub—to let creators deal directly with fans.
No gatekeepers. No corporate leash. No middlemen. A digital back door to the advertising-industrial complex that bypassed the brands, agencies, and editors.
By 2017, the platform was gaining traction in the emerging creator economy. Then, out of 77, a single investor launched an FBI investigation that shut the company down.
Federal prosecutors in the Central District of California alleged three money laundering counts and two wire fraud charges.
The judge dismissed the money laundering counts, and in March, Fritsch went to trial on two counts of wire fraud.
The Timeline Problem
The trial started with prosecutors alleging Fritsch had misled investor Danny Guy about revenue to induce him to invest in the company.
However, evidence presented in court showed the disputed wire communications between Fritsch and Guy occurred after Guy had made his investment. The inconvenient truth is that Guy had already handed over the money before the supposed “lies.”
That detail alone should have sunk the case.
When Facts Don’t Fit, Shift the Story
But after the prosecution’s fake revenue fraud theory fell apart mid-trial, they pivoted to the money laundering charges that the judge dismissed before the trial.
Revenue fraud became spending fraud, and the Feds threw bank statements from unrelated accounts at a jury like confetti. Statements showing payments for private school tuition, vehicles, and rent. Suddenly, it was the lifestyle. A nice car. A son’s tuition.
Confuse and Convict
Despite defense objections and expert rebuttals, the jury, largely unfamiliar with financial complexity, tried to understand. They were bamboozled. Of course they were. That was the plan.
The new argument was that Fritsch used investor funds for personal expenses. He bought himself stuff. What they hid from the jury—what the defense failed to present—was that Fritsch invested over $27 million of his funds.
The payments were to legitimate vendors, landlords, and developers. Management. People who built things. It wasn’t laundering. The money didn’t go into his pockets. It was business.
And that’s how the DOJ convicts a man for something that was never a crime. They trick the jury. That’s the game. DOJ prosecutors are Olympic-level tricksters.
While the prosecutors manipulated the system, the public defender sat there, stunned as the jury watched a PowerPoint about upper-middle-class living.
The jury sees payment after payment from bank statements—blown up on courtroom walls – without context.
He spent money on dinners, clothes, and comfort, a lifestyle supposedly funded with investor money.
Despite the introduction of an expert witness to clarify the relationships between various accounts and companies, the prosecution overwhelmed the jury with a succession of bank statements, paired with images of Fritsch in luxury settings—an expensive car, tuition payments, and a house.
No one could object fast enough. No one could explain. The judge didn’t intervene. Her silence was its own kind of approval. The prosecution presented numbers without meaning, images without context—financial documents, luxury items, domestic scenes—each intended to provoke, not inform.
The prosecution had a rhythm. It was fast. The prosecutors presented evidence in the form of confusion. That’s the trick. Confuse the jury.
The prosecution’s strategy was not justice—it was obfuscation.
The man who built StarClub—a platform for creators to speak for themselves—was treated to a strikingly inconsistent verdict: The jury convicted Fritsch on one count of wire fraud, while acquitting him of another wire fraud charge based on the same facts.
They did what confused juries do: They split the baby.
Guilty, Not Guilty, Same Facts
The jury didn’t know whether it was Tuesday or tax season.
The prosecution couldn’t decide what the hell their story was. And the jury couldn’t either.
So, he was guilty. And innocent. Of the same thing.
And so the truth was defeated not by fact, but by form.
Confusion won. As it always does in the federal legal circus.
The jury saw what the prosecutors meant them to see.
The defense was silenced not by order, but by confusion.
Of course, they brought the charges in through the back door. It’s what they do. The judge just sat there like a potted plant. And Fritsch? He earned his money fair and square, and no one stood up and said, “This is bullshit!”
He needed a lawyer who knew how to say, “Here’s what’s real. And here’s what’s crap.”
But nope. Instead, Bernhard Fritsch got a front-row seat to his own damn railroad.
