One sunny Tuesday in May, I squeezed into the back of Courtroom 8D at the Brooklyn federal courthouse, taking one of the few seats left unfilled. In the defendant’s chair, I caught a glimpse of a face that I saw almost daily for two years.
You may already know—or think you know—the story of Carlos Watson and Ozy Media. The upstart media company collapsed in scandal after the New York Times reported that one of the founders had impersonated a YouTube executive on a reference call with Goldman Sachs for a $40 million investment in the company. Watson’s initial response was that the impersonation was the product of a “mental health issue” from his co-founder, Samir Rao. After an eventful week, during which the controversy quickly expanded to include allegations of inflated numbers, shady dealings, and toxic workplace culture, the company announced that it was shutting down completely. On a four-minute call on a Friday afternoon, Watson told the staff of its shuttering, saying, “Know that I did not want this to be the outcome.”
I was on that call. I worked for Ozy in several roles from 2019 until its demise in 2021. I still remember Watson’s voice cracking with emotion. After that, things moved quickly—email, Slack, and Google access were wiped away immediately, and the staff was laid off with some severance. Somehow, the following Monday, Watson joined Today, smiling big to say, “This is our Lazarus moment,” and that the company would in fact remain open. He asked much of the staff to come back, but almost none did. I certainly did not.
Three years later, Watson faces up to 37 years in prison. He stands convicted of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. A jury in this courthouse decided that Watson played a role in the scheme to defraud investors and lenders, raising approximately $50 million by creating phony financials and forged contracts, misrepresenting audience data, and orchestrating that shocking impersonation attempt.
Proving especially prescient: the company’s name, Ozy, was inspired by “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley—a poem that predicts the inevitable destruction that comes with an inflated ego. The company claimed at the time that it “chose to read it differently.”
The story I saw coming to a grim conclusion in that courtroom was about more than a failed media company and the salacious legal drama that followed. It is a story about race and power, how our society still doesn’t know how to deal with that intersection, and what can go very wrong in that space. At a moment when the country is seeing significant conservative pushback to the ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion—pushback to any attempt to structurally correct the long history of inequity in this country—the story of Carlos Watson highlights how performative corporate promises and the ability to weaponize them also helped doom many efforts at finding justice through DEI. Watson may have built Ozy with big dreams and “diversity” in mind, but as those ideas became corrupted by the superseding desire for capitalistic success, it all came crashing down.
Ozy was my first full-time job out of college. I applied there amid a flurry of applications, eager to get a foot in the door of any company with media in its name. When I got a call for an interview and looked the budding company up, I was excited by what I saw: events, strong reporting, podcasts, and TV shows. There were names that impressed me—Trevor Noah, Padma Lakshmi, Spike Lee, Miguel—and a clear focus on diverse talent. When I went into the office for my interview, I found that Ozy didn’t just highlight diversity in its big names but backed it up with its staff. Ninety percent of the staff, Watson’s team later claimed in testimony, were people of color and/or women.
In my first of many roles, as an operations analyst, I was the assistant to co-founder Samir Rao, filling out the operations team with chief of staff Suzee Han. What that ended up meaning, in reality, was that I was a Swiss Army knife supporting teams across the busy company. The pay was abysmal (and, I later learned, illegal for someone not eligible for overtime pay and pulling my kind of hours in New York City), but the promise seemed infinite. I was seduced by the idea of working for a media company run by people of color with big ambitions. We were focused on telling untold stories and highlighting underrepresented figures. I was promised freedom and growth and mentorship.
Much of that came true. At Ozy, I felt supported by many of my colleagues. Rao and Han were driven, demanding, and brilliant. In late-night meetings, huddled in Rao’s office, I learned how to be a meticulous and efficient employee. My voice was valued, my responsibilities grew, and I was allowed to report stories and help on podcasts, the creative areas in which I expressed interest. Ozy felt like an organization full of high achievers with something to prove. Initially, I was all in.
At the center of Ozy was the lore of Carlos Watson: The son of a Black American mother and Jamaican immigrant father, both teachers. He often told a story about how he had been kicked out of kindergarten but overcome all odds, thanks to his hard work and determination. He attended Harvard, then Stanford Law School, where he was an editor of the school’s law review. He went on to work for McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, co-founded a college-prep and tutoring company that he sold to Kaplan (disclosure: Slate and Kaplan are owned by the same parent company), and eventually transitioned to media, with stints at CNN and MSNBC. “He is telegenic, charismatic, smart as heck, and a natural in the business. I have rarely seen someone with such ease in front of the camera and the ability to connect with people in the way he does,” Princell Hair, then a CNN executive, told a Stanford publication in a 2006 profile.
Then, per Watson, he dropped everything to care for his mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer. It was there, on a whiteboard in her kitchen, that he conceptualized this modern, diverse digital media company, he said. He would call it Ozy and craft it into an outlet for “the new and the next.” It would reflect the world.
Watson had a dream. He would stop at nothing to see Ozy succeed.
This “story of Carlos” is one that easily resonates with those eager to believe the myth of American meritocracy: With enough grit and determination, anyone can make it. But there was also an urgency to this dream, particularly a financial one. Watson often told his staff that failure was not an option. For him, it would have been devastating: His family had invested $20 million in the company. This wasn’t accumulated generational wealth—he had mortgages taken out on several family members’ homes, per later trial testimony. His childhood, in the narrative he tells, had at times included food stamps.
So, Watson relied on the thing he could most easily trust: himself. He built the brand around his personality, his story steeped in race and adversity. And he put all of himself into the company, working 12-hour-plus days, often seven days a week.
Watson is shrewd, determined, and enterprising, as well as an incredibly hard worker, but the quality he seemed to lean on most was his charisma. He charmed investors like Laurene Powell Jobs, Ron Conway, and Marc Lasry into investing in Ozy. He charmed Rao, a Harvard-educated whiz kid he’d met while at Goldman, to become his co-founder. He charmed talented employees to join his company, selling us on his big dreams for this bold, diverse future, urging us to give it everything we had, like he did.
If diversity was the allure of Ozy, it was also its life force. Watson and team hired capable young people and gave us outsize responsibility. For me and for many of my co-workers who became my friends, our identities and upbringing were part of what propelled us to put our heads down and work hard, without asking too many questions—much of the staff, myself included, were Asian American or the children of immigrants, cultures stereotypically more expected to act this way. (I think Watson’s American dream story aligns well with the destructive model minority myth often fed to Asian Americans.)
Rao had just turned 27 when he became Ozy’s co-founder. When the New York office opened, he would fly to the city on a red-eye every week, work 15-hour days, sleep on his brother’s couch, then fly back to California on the weekends to be with his wife and dog. Eva Rodriguez joined Ozy as an intern in college and became the company’s creative director in just a few years. She would later tell CNN Business that she was hospitalized with a panic attack after working several 18-hour days. Han—who, like Rao, has pleaded guilty to involvement in Ozy’s fraud—joined as chief of staff in 2019, at 25. “I really trusted them during my time at Ozy,” Han said of Watson and Rao during her testimony. “I trusted them when they said to me, ‘Many people, everyone, does this. We would be dumb not to.’ ”
I felt similarly. “Everyone does this” was the answer when I was anonymously writing advertorials, like this, that we paid to place in outlets like the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune—only to later attribute glowing pull quotes about Ozy to those publications. “We’d be dumb not to,” I was told when I was texting questionable businesses in the Philippines at midnight to buy Instagram followers for Watson and Ozy. I questioned the ethics (and efficacy) of several of my tasks, but I was always informed that this was the norm in the business—and who was I to question someone with a history of success like Watson’s?
I believe now that this was an intentional strategy: Take advantage of young, diverse talent who might not know better, who might not push back. For many employees, Ozy was our first full-time job.
Watson was a micromanager with a hand in every pot. If he had a whim during his Sunday morning shower, we’d be in a meeting about it within the hour and have a proposal due the next day. He ran Ozy with the toxic grip of a finance firm of the early aughts but with the low salaries of the media startup that we were. He built a culture that demanded excellence.
In some ways, it worked—at least, it seemed as if it was working. Despite the easy jokes made during the scandal around the absurdly inflated numbers, Ozy saw some real success. It had TV deals with the likes of A&E, Hulu, and OWN; innovative festivals in Central Park; well-produced podcasts; and ambitious journalism from talented reporters across the globe.
The staff was extraordinary, and many stories made an impact: They did highlight the underrepresented communities we claimed to. As an employee, I had a vague sense that we maybe didn’t have the audience we were saying we did—but I never understood the reality of the fraudulent sculpture we were building. Information was siloed. Chiseling away in my little corner, I might have known about our fake Instagram followers or the unconfirmed festival guests we had promised to lure in big names, but not about TV deals, email subscribers, or financials that were similarly suspect. Another colleague might have known about our strategies to pump up YouTube views, but not the other stuff. Only the master sculptor who was guiding the tools, the person who planned out the full statue, could step back and see the crude effigy of lies we were making. And in my experience, that maestro was Watson.
Behind the scenes of the pearly-white smile Watson put on for TV cameras and festival panels was a factory of overworked, young employees, often people of color, caught up in the allure of making something diverse and special—and a fake-it-till-you-make-it mentality at the top that was testing its limits. Ozy leaders were willing not just to fabricate numbers and forge documents, but also to contort themselves to fit into whatever distorted mold they thought would benefit the company. And it only got worse.
Things took a turn at Ozy during the summer of 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic meant we started working from home, productions stopped, staff was laid off, and salaries were cut. (During this time, Watson and Rao reportedly took no salary.) But things changed more significantly after the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests.
Suddenly, the diversity that had long been core to Ozy’s values was being celebrated—or at least forced into conversations—more broadly. Ozy reset its editorial priorities, quite literally, rebranding its editorial mission as a chance to “Reset America” with content focused on racial inequity and “solutions.”
I was proud to be part of a company in which these conversations were not peripheral small talk or forced into awkward all-hands meetings by well-meaning HR professionals but central to and defining of our product. I also wondered if this editorial reset was tinged with opportunism.
It was during this “racial reckoning” summer of 2020 that Watson decided that he was the voice the world needed. He became an even more public-facing CEO. We activated his Instagram account and filled it with tepidly race-oriented stories and throwback photos of Watson and his family. We brought in PR firms and pitched journalists profiles of Watson and his fantastic rise. Most importantly, he became the host of his own talk show, The Carlos Watson Show. Quickly, the program became the priority of every department.
At the same time, its status kept changing. First, it was announced as a prime-time show on A&E, then maybe a Hulu Original. In the end, it was simply uploaded onto YouTube. But there were still newsletters, marketing campaigns, and ad deals to tend to.
Watson’s face was plastered on billboards across New York, Los Angeles, and Miami with pull quotes—as with those falsified by employees, like yours truly—calling him “the greatest interviewer on TV” and comparing him with Oprah. On the show, he interviewed everyone from Scarlett Johansson to Ava DuVernay, Matthew McConaughey to H.E.R. “The most diverse lineup on TV,” advertisements called it. During interviews, Watson coasted on his charm, rarely attending the preinterview research and prep-meeting schedule before filming.
Watson was often eager to keep it light on the show. He asked Ann Coulter about her favorite movie, but not her regular racist screeds. He furrowed his brow and nodded as Jemele Hill recounted the racism and misogyny she had faced as a sports reporter but gave the same look of thoughtfulness to Sean Spicer defending his actions as press secretary. There is absolutely room for a show that interviews everyone from Bill Gates to vegan TikTok influencer Tabitha Brown, Rep. Ilhan Omar to Danica Patrick, Megyn Kelly to Priyanka Chopra. The variety of names represents a “diverse lineup”—but variety is not enough when guests aren’t treated in accordance with the power they yield or held accountable for the impacts they have made on society. Watson wasn’t doing that.
He handled his public persona with the same “lightness” he had with the show, focusing on his American dream version of the Carlos Watson story, rather than the more complicated one that evoked his whole self. As my time at Ozy continued, I started to see more cracks in the story. While running his social media, we were encouraged to stay vague: Focus on Watson’s love of his family and pickup basketball. He refused to take selfies—most photos of him now came from photo shoots with professional makeup and lighting. He wanted to be a beloved figure without sharing vulnerabilities, often editing and smoothing out the parts of his past that didn’t fit his desired mold. As someone who knew Watson beyond the exterior he put up, it was his vulnerabilities that made him interesting, even likable—not just the adversity he faced in the past that he could easily package, but the quirks that made him human. Yet, just as he struggled to share his political opinions, he struggled to share his struggles. Maybe he really cared about this vision of a diverse, justice-oriented company—but it seemed to me that that was only when he thought it made him look good or inoffensive. Stick with the glossy, the easy.
It was perhaps this glossy veneer and American dream story that made Watson approachable to advertisers—especially in the wake of 2020’s BLM movement, when marketers and agencies were turning their attention to “diverse voices.” JPMorgan Chase partnered with The Carlos Watson Show to boast its commitment to underserved communities. Discover used the show to highlight its support of Black-owned businesses. GroupM, one of the biggest media agencies in the world, signed a two-year “preferred partnership” with Ozy to further the agency’s DEI efforts, agreeing to have Ozy create content for many of its clients. Dentsu made a three-year deal as part of its investment in “meaningful media.”
Pitching Ozy as a minority-run media company was not new at that time, someone familiar with sales at Ozy told me as I wrote this essay. It was something the team would often lean on to make sales or attract certain investors for whom this would be seen as a positive. Watson had always faced the added obstacles of being a Black man in media, and that was always part of his work.
But with marketers suddenly looking to fill new-found diversity quotas, Watson was all too happy to be their smiling solution. He seemed to find particular success doing so. While the real finances of Ozy are still hard to delineate due to the fraudulent numbers, reporting from Axios in January 2021 pointed to Ozy’s being profitable and suggested we had gotten $50 million in revenue from these sales deals and raised over $70 million in venture-capital funding. At the time, it felt as if we were making it.
“When we were out there fighting for Black-owned media to get advertising dollars, you were the darling of the industry. You weren’t out there fighting with us,” Roland Martin, host of the YouTube show #RolandMartinUnfiltered, later said of Watson after Ozy had fallen apart. “You were the darling of white venture-capital money. Y’all raised $75 million.
“Here’s what I know, as a Black-owned media executive,” Martin added. “Our numbers were real. We couldn’t get anyone to do a story on us.” (I reached out to Martin for this story but never heard back.)
At least some people I worked with at Ozy agree with Martin, and many former employees have their own stories. Eugene Robinson was employee No. 1 at the company, lured with promises of freedom and fame. “If he actually cared about [diversity],” he told me recently, “he would have, at the very least, been nicer to us.”
Robinson said his experience with Watson, which he has documented, was toxic and manipulative. Watson, he said, was particularly hard on Black employees. Robinson recounted that when a colleague asked the staff whom Watson had screamed at, only employees of color raised their hands. To Robinson, Watson’s story and commitment to diversity was “massive fucking gamesmanship” for the sake of personal fame and the “unimpeachableness” that goes along with it. “He spun it into a narrative that sounded great,” Robinson said. “If he was going to work that angle on the grift, it had to look real.”
In response to questions from Slate about the way Watson treated his employees of color, Watson’s lawyers sent a statement reasserting the company’s representative bona fides, including noting that 90 percent of Ozy’s 1,000 hires were “women or people of color.” They added, “ Mr. Watson has always treated his team with fairness and respect.”
Beyond Watson’s leadership flaws and self-involved maneuverings, the success he found from his narrative of “diversity” speaks to a broader issue around corporatized DEI initiatives. Banks and huge corporations are often eager to use figures like Watson to hit their quotas and prove a commitment to “diversity” with minimal substance behind those efforts. Watson accepted those efforts and didn’t hold anyone accountable. The story of Watson kept growing, a Potemkin village of charm, a performance of himself as the answer to calls for diversity, with so much at stake but no real foundation, even among the people at his own company.
Then, it all toppled.
Back in the courthouse, almost three years after Ozy’s collapse, I found myself sympathizing with Watson, against my better judgment. He really is a master of his craft—and his craft is spinning a seductive tale that often works because it has some grounding in reality and is targeted at people who care about change.
On Watson’s side sat “representative” representation. His lawyer is Ronald Sullivan, a famed Black defense attorney who leads Harvard Law’s Criminal Justice Institute. Representing Ozy was Shannon Frison, an acclaimed Black lawyer and Marine major. Alongside them was a diverse spectrum of legal support. Although there are several white lawyers on Watson’s team, none of them were seated at the defendant’s table on opening day.
Carlos Watson leaving Brooklyn federal court on July 1 after testifying in his own defense. Watson told a jury he never schemed to con backers of his Ozy Media. AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah
As the Watson and Ozy lawyers struggled with unsubmitted evidence that day, I watched on the other side, where it felt as if I saw the all-white prosecution table share a joint eye-roll with the Donald Trump–appointed judge, an unspoken understanding. They may have just been annoyed by the delay, but to me, it felt deeper. As if they had a shared language the defense couldn’t understand. It seemed as if the racist flaws in our justice system were playing out in front of my eyes. Maybe I was just imagining things, but therein lies the problem: In a system built on inequity, any gesture can leave you questioning the balance of power, heightened in a place with so much at stake, where the scales of justice are supposed to be at their best.
Then both sides made their opening statements. The prosecution’s opening was straightforward—true to my experience of Watson’s hyperinvolvement in all elements of Ozy’s business and, thus, his involvement in trying to lure investors with false numbers and fake contracts. When Sullivan stood up for Watson’s defense, he spoke for almost an hour, pacing and pausing with dramatic inflections. He spent most of his time sharing the American dream story of Watson and his family. For the limited time, they focused on the details of the case, their defense against the fraud focused on blaming Rao, claiming that Watson hadn’t known about the financial lies taking place.
While Rao and Han both pleaded guilty to wrongdoing, Watson did not, intent that he could tell his own media-ready tale of innocence. It quickly became clear that Watson had focused more on building a narrative around accusations of racism in the case than on the case itself.
Watson and team filed a motion to dismiss his case based on charges that the prosecution was racially motivated, citing an investigation they did that claims that 90 percent of these prosecutors’ cases have been against Black and brown defendants. They built a website, Too Black for Business, which explains the overpolicing and systemic discrimination Black entrepreneurs face. But, as ever, the site puts “The Troubling Case of Carlos Watson” at its center. There is an almost two-hour documentary that tells his story made in his defense, with a second part coming soon. There are social pages with updates and calls for “justice watchers” to come to the court every day and a fundraiser with more than $60,000.
Many of the points Watson’s legal team made were, frankly, inescapably true about how the justice system is stacked against Black defendants, no matter who they are. The weaponization of our justice system to disproportionally prosecute and incarcerate people of color, particularly Black men, is a huge problem. There is vast, structural discrimination against Black people in business and entrepreneurship, as there is in most systems in American society. But once again, Watson was trying to use these facts to his advantage—while barely refuting the real claims of wrongdoing before him.
As Martin put it on his show: “Oh, now all of a sudden you want to put on a kente coat, now all of a sudden you want to act like you’re championing African Americans.” He continued, “If you’re doing some illegal shit, don’t be trying to all of a sudden cloak yourself in Blackness.”
As with Ozy, in the trial, Watson placed his story next to the reality of injustice, hoping he could get swept up by the wave. But this time it didn’t happen.
On July 16, he was found guilty. A jury decided he had, in fact, played a role in making up numbers, falsifying documents, faking partnerships, and more to make Ozy look more profitable and valuable to investors. (Watson intends to appeal. His team is also arguing that the judge should have recused due to financial conflicts of interest that essentially amount to the idea that the judge has a financial stake in some of the corporations Watson was courting for Ozy investment; those alleged conflicts are indirect.) As his sentencing approaches, prosecutors have asked he be punished with 17 years in prison.
When I asked Robinson how he felt about Watson ending up in prison, he laughed. “You know the answer to that,” he told me. He thinks Watson is “a horrible human being” who is getting what he deserves. It’s a fair take for someone who experienced Watson as Robinson did.
When I think of Watson heading to prison, I find it heartbreaking. When I think of him, terrified, at the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center with a violent cellmate, as the Daily Beast reported, I find it heartbreaking. When I think of the puffy purple seat pads I saw a couple of “justice watchers” had brought with them to the courtroom, ready for long days of sitting and overseeing what they believed to be true injustice taking place, I find it heartbreaking. When I think of his family, who gave so much to see him shine—who, I imagine, truly believed in his trailblazing potential—I find it heartbreaking.
Maybe this heartbreak is representative of my naïveté. It’s me once again getting swooned by Watson’s charisma and some sense of idealism that doesn’t actually exist in this world of capital and cons. But I think one’s perspective on the tragedy (or lack thereof) of Watson’s imminent incarceration comes from their perspective on his ultimate intention.
To Robinson, it was always a con. Diversity was Watson’s grift, “the card he played,” for fame and “unimpeachableness.” I agree that at the trial, Watson and team used this nakedly as a legal strategy. He was desperate, throwing oppression spaghetti against the wall and hoping that something would stick. To “pimp out,” in the words of Martin, these truly urgent problems for the sake of your own false innocence represents an ugly opportunism. It is offensive.
But if at the trial it was all just a ploy, I still wonder if, with Ozy, there was ever real belief behind Watson’s promise to build this different, diverse, and special company. I have to wonder if I was always just a pawn or ever part of a real vision.
After years of grappling with this question after my idealism-crushing work experience at Ozy, I think I’ve come up with an answer: Both are true.
At one point, I think, Watson really believed in his vision.
Deep on YouTube, below hundreds of shiny episodes of The Carlos Watson Show, there’s a video of Watson giving a speech at Winston-Salem State University in 2005. He’s talking to a group of students at a historically Black college, not pontificating to the camera or charming potential investors. In the speech, he says that he believes that the 21st century will be the “century of the Black American.” He would bet his mother’s Social Security that by 2020 there will be 20 Black senators and 100 Black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. (In 2020 there were actually only three Black senators and four Black Fortune 500 CEOs.) In the video, Watson says that when the students turn on the news in this future, “whether it is CNN or something we don’t even know about yet,” these students would see Black faces smiling back at them.
Eight years later, he set out to build that thing. I believe that when he started Ozy, Watson really thought he could be part of changing the face of power in America. He thought he would be a leader in it. He saw Vice and BuzzFeed doing well with mostly white leaders at the top. Why couldn’t there be one run by people of color?
Yet it was this exact determination—to build power in an inherently flawed system—that turned him into the conning strategist he became. His ego and obsessive persistence left his ideals, and any sense of morals, in the dust.
Watson built something that, at its core, had a vision of a brighter, more diverse world ahead of it, but he was so busy painting the veneer on thick that he didn’t realize he could no longer see inside the window.
At best, Watson is an accomplished and ambitious but deeply flawed leader—and a convicted criminal—with an outsize ego who created a toxic work environment and took advantage of young, skilled employees. At worst, he is a megalomaniacal mastermind who, from Robinson’s experience, was manipulative and racially prejudiced. But it is also hard for me not to see him as a victim of this moment too.
In a country built on and thriving in so much financial abuse and disturbed visions of power, his wrongdoing is significant, but far from the most corrupt thing that happens in the financial world on a regular basis. It’s worth remembering that the victims of the crimes he’s being charged for—the crimes for which he could be incarcerated up to 37 years—are banks and billionaire investor funds.
It was a perfect storm: a background, likely born from his parents, that told him that with enough hard work, he could succeed at anything; a fake-it-till-you-make-it mentality likely learned from his time at Goldman and McKinsey; and a digital media moment that promised space for new things to grow.
That storm reached its apex in 2020, when it finally looked as if the country were open to some actual change. The moment felt ripe with promise. Watson, determined to find fame and success at any cost, hopped on the wave of this societal “moment of reckoning.”
But that “reckoning,” in the business world, largely ended up just being a couple of marketing agencies checking off a box. Now, across the country, DEI efforts are dwindling, lost in conservative pushback and their own inefficacy. Republican legislatures have introduced 86 bills banning or restricting DEI efforts. These measures have passed in 14 states. Much of the politics on the right recently have focused on the “anti-woke” agenda, and with the reelection of Donald Trump, anti-DEI efforts will surely flourish.
Diversity does not mean much. It never has. It is too broad a term, one that can be easily corrupted. Efforts toward diversity in a corporate world already laden with deception would obviously be riddled with contradictions and performance.
Watson’s attempt to take advantage of the moment, of this squishiness, and of his own background is unsurprising, even understandable, for someone eager for financial success in a system built to keep you out. But he lied and schemed. By playing to these contrived and ultimately short-lived corporate quotas—efforts he should have known were not building toward real justice—he made himself an easy investment, but he also lost himself along the way. He used people, like Robinson and me and so many others who wanted to believe in the more equitable world he was selling, but maybe lost sight of himself.
In the end, Watson’s story may fit an alternative reading of “Ozymandias.” It isn’t an epic but a more specific, more sad story of ambition so bright it blinds the king to his own delusions. It blinds the king to the destruction he causes. I won’t be at Watson’s sentencing. I have little faith in our carceral system’s ability to correct the wrongs here. I do hope someday Watson will see “that colossal wreck” he created. But I’m not optimistic.
