The Hollywood Producer’s Fraud Scandals & Prison Sentence

By most Hollywood metrics, David Ozer was a success.

Following in his father’s footsteps, he started out in radio ad sales, made the move to account executive over at 20th Century Fox and continued on an upward trajectory as an exec at several major companies, including Starz Media and Sony Pictures Television.

Everyone agrees that Ozer was a charismatic guy, even if he came off a little nerdy. He would tell you about his successes, but never in a brash way like so many in this business can. He wore his achievements lightly, but confidently. He was smooth. He had the connections. He could set up meetings for folks all over town with major agencies and development execs. He had juice.

Then, in mid-2024, seemingly out of the blue, the 59-year-old producer was accused — first in a civil suit and then in a federal indictment in the Central District Court of California — of siphoning funds from one of his own shows for personal use.

The show was a supernatural series called Safehaven, co-produced by North Carolina-based Strong Studios, of which Ozer served as president, and by Michael Bay’s 451 Media Group, which published the original comic book on which it was based. Ozer was accused of embezzling more than $200,000 from the production budget. He did this, the indictment said, by creating phony invoices from dummy companies and forging his accountant’s signature on backup documentation. Because Ozer had emailed some of these falsified documents, it was considered a federal crime under the Interstate Wire Fraud Statute.

The embezzlement accusations would turn out to be just the beginning of Ozer’s troubles. The news prompted a string of phone calls all over town from people in business with Ozer. One of those in a sudden panic was an established screenwriter who would later be referred to in the federal case as C.C. (He requested I not use his name since he is worried his association with Ozer will affect his professional prospects.) As alleged in that case, in January 2024, he’d given Ozer $30,000 as a short-term bridge loan, supposedly to help the producer lock in an actor he needed for a crime series called Endangered, about rhino poaching in South Africa. In exchange for the loan, C.C. expected to receive an executive producer credit on the series and get $40,000 back within four weeks. EP credit and a 33 percent return on investment in a month’s time was too good to pass up.

As C.C. shared with THR, that $30,000 wasn’t a drop in the bucket for him. It was a precarious time, coming on the heels of COVID, the writers strike and then the actors strike. He’d considered the investment carefully, going over it with his wife before committing.

A month passed and C.C. didn’t receive the money he was owed. Because of Ozer’s established track record, the screenwriter wasn’t especially alarmed. “Just a minor setback,” Ozer assured him, according to C.C. “You know how showbiz is.“ In the meantime, Ozer set up some meetings for the writer to help him get another project of his off the ground. Still, he wanted his money back.

Time and again, Ozer allayed C.C.’s concerns. To prove the lengths he was going to get the writer paid, Ozer sent a picture purportedly of himself at his local Chase branch, which C.C. showed me. “Morning,” Ozer wrote in his text, “I’m at the bank to figure this all out.”

Well into summer, the money hadn’t arrived. Now C.C. couldn’t get Ozer on the phone. He went back through his emails and found a phone number that Ozer had given him for an investor whom federal prosecutors would later refer to as “J.B., an award-winning film producer” who had a production company based in Dallas. According to the federal court documents, J.B. had vouched for Ozer when C.C. had discussed the proposed bridge loan. The writer decided to call J.B., with whom he’d only communicated by email to that point, to find out what was going on.

When he dialed the number he had for J.B., he was shocked to hear a familiar voice on the other end: “This is David … I mean, um … hello?”

The screenwriter was confused. “David? David Ozer? Is that you?”

***

The Ozer family had known its share of controversy over the years. David is the oldest son of former broadcast executive Marty Ozer. He and his younger brother, Todd, led a charmed upbringing in the affluent suburb of Woodbury, New York. Marty had a successful career at Metromedia and a succession of major TV stations and networks. Their mother, Barbara, was a Long Island socialite. The family’s flashy open houses and intimate dinner parties were featured in a puff piece in Newsday in 1983.

The boys had a privileged childhood. Their estate had a tennis court — not that unusual for the wealthy enclaves of Long Island, but the Ozer court had stands so that people could watch Todd, a tennis phenom in his younger years, play the game.

Both sons followed their father into the business, with early jobs in radio advertising. David eventually landed as an exec at 20th Century Fox, a gig he tends to leave off his official bios and IMDb profile. The gap makes sense when you hear about his embarrassing involvement with the Fox show A Current Affair.

The Nov. 3, 1992, episode of that program focused on a rising New York politician named Richard Korn. It depicted Korn as a playboy romancing socialites on Long Island and trying to swindle them out of their houses. Three women were featured in the story. One’s identity was obscured; the other two were Shelley Silver and Barbara Ozer, David’s mother.

After the show aired, Korn sued. According to a Newsday report at the time, Korn claimed he was approached before the taping of the show and told his career would be destroyed unless he paid $10,000. He spurned the demands and the show aired, effectively ending Korn’s political ambitions.

Silver recanted her story. “Words that I spoke on the show about Richard Korn were lies,” she said in a 57-page sworn statement, according to Newsday and The Daily News, “and other things said about Richard Korn on the show were lies.” Silver also stated that Barbara Ozer had orchestrated their whole appearance on the show hoping to harm Korn politically and personally. In addition to the alleged blackmail of Korn by the Ozer family, Silver claimed that David Ozer, then 27, told her he had been the one who approached a Current Affair producer about doing the episode on Korn. (Fox’s lawyers stood by the Current Affair report. Barbara Ozer denied any wrongdoing.)

Soon after making her statement, Silver left Long Island. According to Newsday, she said that Barbara Ozer’s political connections frightened her: “I live in constant fear for my safety. I fear my phones are tapped, that I am being followed and that I would be physically hurt.” The New York State Supreme Court judge in the case signed an order that would conceal her new out-of-state address. Even now, more than 30 years later, she did not want to comment.

David Ozer’s father, Marty, was divorced from Barbara before the Korn incident but was working at Fox TV at the time. He was never mentioned in the scheme alongside the rest of his family, not that Ozer’s dad avoided trouble altogether.

In 2018, the elder Ozer had been removed from his gig as the executive director of The Ronald McDonald House Charities in Reno, Nevada, amid allegations of sexual harassment and financial misconduct. Marty (who died in June) claimed he did nothing wrong and called his dismissal a railroad job. Positing that a conspiracy was behind the charges, he told the Reno Gazette-Journal, “There is obviously somebody who has a hard-on for me.” An odd response, considering this was at the height of the #MeToo movement.

***

The Current Affair controversy did little to hamper David’s career. After his stint at Fox, Ozer continued to rise through the Hollywood ranks. In 2013, he was named president of IDW Entertainment, an indie comic book publisher, where he oversaw the development and production of three seasons of Wynonna Earp for Syfy and two seasons of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency for BBC America. He then left IDW to found Landmark Studio Group, which was owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. While there, he shepherded several big projects, including the Nicolas Cage movie Willy’s Wonderland and Trigger Point, starring Barry Pepper.

It was during his time at Landmark that I first crossed paths with Ozer. In 2019, he produced his first comedy special, for the streaming service Crackle (also owned by Chicken Soup), starring a popular Long Island comedian named Carie Karavas. In addition to the special, Ozer promised her a role in his in-development series Flagrant, starring Michael Rapaport, a dramedy about a disgraced former college basketball player. He asked her if she knew any good writing talent she could bring to him. I was doing stand-up comedy then and helping Karavas craft new material after shooting that special. She set us up for a lunch meeting where I met David Ozer for the first time.

Writing TV comedy had always been an aspiration, and I’d been considered for a couple of network writing rooms in the past, so this seemed like a great opportunity. I’d done my due diligence and was impressed with Ozer’s background. He had nothing but good things to say about my writing samples and promised me a spot in the Flagrant writers room once it got greenlit. But he wanted us to work together right away.

He proposed a deal for me to produce comedy specials like the one he’d just shot for Crackle and wanted me to set up 10 more just like it. We shook hands, and I spent a few weeks working on our joint project. I never heard from him again. I was annoyed, and I let him know it. But I’ve been in this business for quite a while. Ozer was not the first guy in Hollywood to make promises he couldn’t keep.

I put the matter out of my mind and eventually went back to my side gig doing development for an Emmy-winning New York casting director named Ross Meyerson. He had cast me in a few of the shows he worked on, and I’d been reading scripts and doing coverage for him off and on over the years. I’d thought little about Ozer until fall 2022, when Meyerson mentioned meeting with him about a new project. A year later, Ozer and one of his colleagues persuaded Meyerson to quit his successful casting business and join their new venture, Strong Studios, as executive vice president. The honeymoon phase was short-lived and his working relationship with Ozer quickly faltered.

In a lawsuit he brought years later in New York State Court, Meyerson claimed Strong Studios never paid him the salary or signing bonus he was promised. “Instead,” the complaint stated, “Ozer fed him a battery of lies as to why payment was delayed … while continuing to induce Meyerson to provide services for which he would not be compensated.”

It was a complaint many others would echo. After news hit of Ozer’s Safehaven embezzlement indictment in 2024, Ozer spent months reassuring folks that the charges were all going to go away. But the cracks in his unflappable facade were starting to show, and he was beginning to make mistakes.

***

“David Ozer? Is that you?” C.C. told me it seemed obvious to him that Ozer had picked up the call on a burner phone he’d been using to impersonate J.B., the well-connected Hollywood investor who’d supposedly vouched for him. As soon as he used his real name, he seemed to realize his error, recalls C.C. The voice on the other line changed his tone immediately and said his name was Keith and that he was in Minnesota. The screenwriter shot back, “David, I can tell it’s you. What’s going on? Where’s my money?!” “Keith” said he didn’t know what C.C. was talking about and hung up. Now the screenwriter was sure something was amiss. His doubts only deepened when Ozer called him back 30 minutes later, as himself this time, saying he was just calling to check in.

Unable to get a straight answer from the producer, C.C. showed his own bank the financial documents Ozer had sent him. Within minutes, C.C. told me, the manager at his Chase branch handed the paperwork back to him and said, “These are not legitimate records. You are being defrauded.”

According to C.C., Ozer continued to claim his innocence. “Listen, I’m not some scumbag. I’m going to make this right.” He did not. (Ozer never responded to multiple requests for comment.)

It was a scenario that played out over and over. Around the time he had convinced C.C. to lend him money, Ozer had made a similar bridge loan offer to a showbiz-adjacent woman identified in the federal case as Ri. R. On Jan. 1, 2024, she wired him $50,000, in exchange for which she was told she would receive executive producer credit on Endangered and get paid back $65,000. The following month, he asked her for an additional $40,000, which Ri. R promptly sent. The money she was promised in return never came.

Three such schemes were documented in the federal case in California’s Central District, including C.C.’s and Ri. R’s. In addition, I spoke to multiple people who alleged that they had also been conned by Ozer but never sued, preferring to avoid the hassle and expense of litigation.

There was a pattern to his deception: If he owed someone money, he’d promise that payment would be made immediately. When it didn’t materialize, he vowed to make it up to them by wiring the money. When that didn’t happen, he’d say that “it must be a problem at your bank.” When the victim would talk to their own bank, Ozer would say something like, “Oh, it’s a problem on my end. It’s a new account, but everything is resolved now. Wire is on its way.” Then when it failed to arrive, he would say, “Oh, I was told the company was going to cover that, I’ll call now and rip somebody a new one.” He always vowed to make things right.

One alleged victim told me she eventually said, “Forget the wire, can you just mail out a certified check?” According to this person, Ozer texted back, “Great idea!” And the next day he sent a tracking number for the box he sent the check in. The creditor spent days hitting refresh on the FedEx tracking site but never saw the package appear. When she complained, Ozer responded with a picture of the box he said he’d sent the check in as proof that he followed through and that it must be FedEx’s fault. It was always someone else’s fault.

And then there was the time he tried to pull the wool over the eyes of a former FBI agent. In 2022, Ozer met Robert Roschman, an investor who’d served on the board of Strong Global Entertainment, the parent company of Strong Studios. During one of their conversations about new productions, Roschman says he suggested Ozer talk to a buddy of his, David Billitier, a retired FBI agent who had a trove of great stories from his time at the bureau. Ozer was interested. An introduction and meetings followed.

Billitier did have a hell of a story to tell about his decades of undercover work for the FBI, including several years infiltrating a Colombian drug ring in Texas. Not that he was interested in show business or fame. But since Roschman and Ozer seemed to think his exploits would make a great movie, he went with it. Ozer said they’d need a strong writer to put together a script, which would require some development money. He told them he could bring on an established screenwriter for the WGA minimum of $125,000. The three of them struck a deal, with Roschman and Ozer opening a joint account, each putting in $62,500 to get the project rolling, as outlined in federal court documents.

Soon, Roschman and Billitier were in L.A. meeting with Terry Matalas, a British screenwriter who had worked on and produced the MacGyver reboot, Syfy’s 12 Monkeys and Paramount+’s Star Trek: Picard. Roschman and Billitier say they spoke with Matalas for about an hour and a half and came away enthusiastic about the project.

Roschman and Billitier assumed there would be more meetings. Their chat with Matalas was a good start, but surely he’d need to hear more about Billitier’s adventures to craft an entire script. Ozer reassured them that Matalas was already plugging away. He’d tell them he was making good progress. “He’s already 60 pages in! It’s coming along great,” they recalled Ozer saying. When they questioned how he could write so much based on what little information they had shared, Ozer told them they didn’t understand how writers work. It was all about the process.

Months passed and they kept getting the same updates from Ozer. Billitier resorted to calling Matalas directly. When the former fed asked him how the script was proceeding, he was met with stunned silence. “I haven’t heard a word from Ozer since our meeting back in the spring,” Matalas said, according to Billitier. “He never paid me, so I assumed the deal was dead and moved on to other projects.” (Reps for Matalas had no comment.)

Roschman and Billitier immediately called Ozer, furious. Why had he been lying to them for so long, saying the script was nearly done when the writing had never even been started? And where was Roschman’s money if the writer hadn’t received it? Ozer hemmed and hawed. He said that Matalas was a crazy creative type, feeding them nonsense. Ozer claimed he had decided that Matalas wasn’t right for the project and had hired another writer for them to talk to. That didn’t explain why he’d seemingly been lying about the updates all along, but he somehow convinced them that this new writer was going to make things right.

Billitier and Roschman met with the new writer, who also had an impressive track record in network sitcoms and indie films, and started the process again. They were told this scribe would be paid from Roschman’s original investment. The writer, who asked not to be named because he was eager to put the painful experience behind him, wrote a complete treatment, which THR has reviewed. But the money promised by Ozer never appeared. It was the same old story: The wire didn’t go through, problems with his bank, etc. But this time Ozer deflected, saying that the funding was coming from one of his new partners. He offered to connect the writer with J.B., the noted film and TV producer. J.B.’s Dallas-based company appeared to be legit and the writer exchanged several emails and chatted on the phone a few times with a man he believed to be J.B., easing his concerns over getting paid. At least for a while.

The writer eventually lost patience and reached out to a colleague he had in common with J.B., telling him how pissed he was about not getting paid. The colleague didn’t believe J.B. would do something like that, so he called him up right away. J.B. didn’t know what he was talking about. Confused, they conferenced in the writer. Immediately, the writer realized that this wasn’t the same J.B. he’d been talking to. He’d been duped. Both the writer and J.B. presumed the voice on the other end of those earlier phone calls was in fact David Ozer — on what was likely yet another burner phone.

All of his email exchanges with J.B.? Presumably Ozer again. They had been sent from an account that was just close enough to J.B.’s real email info to look legit. A quick GoDaddy search revealed that the fake domain was set up the morning of the writer’s first interaction with fake J.B. (The suffix “ent,” for “entertainment,” was added to the domain name of the real J.B.’s email address.)

That was the final straw for the writer, J.B., Roschman and Billitier, who say they severed ties with him at that point.

They were especially furious to learn that while he was professing to all of them that the Safehaven charges were nothing more than a misunderstanding over creative differences, he was preparing to plead guilty to embezzlement in the federal case in California.

***

On July 30, 2024, Ozer signed a plea agreement with prosecutors acknowledging his intent to defraud and obtain money from the Safehaven production under false pretenses. He admitted that he took about $137,000 from a production bank account for his personal use by providing phony invoices meant to look like legitimate production costs. He also withdrew $78,000 from another bank account earmarked for the production.

As part of his plea agreement, Ozer would have to appear in court. But by that point, the federal case had grown even more damning for him. After the initial embezzlement charges were announced, some of the victims discussed here came forward and met with the feds. By the end of 2024, the federal case against Ozer included not just the Safehaven embezzlement charges, but his dealings with Roschman and the two bridge loan victims, C.C. and Ri. R. Ozer’s misdeeds had finally caught up with him.

In the revised plea agreement filed Dec. 12, 2024, Ozer admitted creating “fraudulent documents, including falsified bank records, as well as forged correspondence from J.B.” In exchange for his admission, he would be charged with just two counts of wire fraud, one for the Safehaven charges and another for the new ones.

On May 6, David Ozer at last appeared in the Central District courtroom of Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr. and formally pleaded guilty to the two counts of wire fraud. He was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and ordered to pay almost $400,000 in restitution. On July 14, he surrendered to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Since so many of the people I talked to, who claimed to be victims of Ozer’s schemes, were not included in the federal case, we may never know exactly how much money he allegedly conned people out of over the years.

The second writer on the Billitier project never saw a dime, despite turning in a treatment that would normally earn him a WGA minimum of $50,000. My fellow comedian Karavas tells me she was never paid for that special that is still streaming. Meyerson, the aggrieved casting director, says he never saw most of the money promised to him. And so many others. A few grand here, tens of thousands there. The loss of wages of so many people caught in Ozer’s web is not calculable.

The original civil suit against Ozer in the Safehaven case, filed by executive producer Kevin V. Duncan and a Denver-based production company called Ravenwood, is ongoing. (The Safehaven project was picked up for international distribution this year.) In addition, Meyerson sued Ozer in New York State Court this year, alleging he was never paid his salary or signing bonus.

There is little evidence that Ozer has been humbled. Even after his plea deal and his admission of guilt, Ozer was allegedly telling confusing and conflicting stories about the cause of his problems. One producer I interviewed says Ozer told him he resorted to stealing the original Safehaven money because of an incident that took place when he was in New Orleans. Ozer said he had ordered a prostitute online before having second thoughts and canceling. But the people running the service he had gone through had supposedly seen his name in a news release and asked him for more money. They blackmailed him and told him they were going to call his son, Ozer said, according to the director.

Ozer told several people a version of this story. When he was confronted about his deception during a Zoom call with the entire Endangered team, he broke down in tears. According to a participant on the Zoom call who asked for anonymity in order to speak freely, Ozer told the tale of a woman he’d supposedly connected with on Tinder, who’d lured him out to Vegas and had pictures of him on a plane. When he was asked why he paid the blackmailer off if all she had was a few texts and an innocuous picture of him on a plane, he said that she had already sent damning emails to his wife and kids. Which led to the obvious question, “If she already told your family, why the hell are you paying them off?!”

I have interviewed dozens of people over several months for this article. What stands out is the sheer volume of lies that Ozer allegedly told. Colleagues claim he wasn’t capable of telling the truth, even in the simplest of situations. One victim says every conversation with him was filled with “kernels of deceit.”

As I was putting the finishing touches on this story, I reached back out to Ozer several times for comment. I wanted to give him a chance to respond to the allegations of wrongdoing beyond what he had already pleaded guilty to. I never heard back.

Ozer is serving his sentence at FCI Otisville in New York, where he is known as Inmate #36264-511. He will remain locked up until late 2026. The 18-month sentence falls well short of the 40-year maximum for the two counts of wire fraud he pleaded guilty to, let alone the potential penalty for the wider range of deceptions he admitted to in his plea agreement. But perhaps the most severe consequence of his actions will be in the court of Hollywood. Any future Google search will reveal that he is no longer a high-flying exec. This is a man who lied to people for decades. This is a producer who swindled money endlessly and made life hell for his victims. This is a convicted felon. This is David.

This story appeared in the Oct. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.