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This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.
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This episode of Swindled may contain graphic descriptions or audio recordings of disturbing events which may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
They bribed government officials, cleared violations of federal and state law, paid millions of taxpayer dollars that were wasted, paid tens of millions of dollars, by falsifying its books and records, and in control of some kind of sling or set rod.
It sounds glitzy and exciting. A $2.8 billion film studio project on more than 500 acres of open land near the small city of Dixon, California. A thousand or so jobs, an economic boost, Hollywood glamour. Some Dixon officials believe if the city builds a film studio, Hollywood will come. From open field to film studio, Los Angeles company plans to develop studio.
That was the headline of a front page article in the Dixon Tribune in July 2012. According to the developer's CEO, Carissa Carpenter, the vision was crystal clear.
The facilities and streets of Morning View Studios, which was a temporary name, would encompass multiple themes such as the desert, a castle, a Mexican village, China, the jungle, and the Bible.
There would be restaurants and hotels and movie theaters and, of course, there would be sound stages and film sets used by the best in the movie-making business. Unfortunately, Carissa Carpenter couldn't yet divulge who was backing her. She was only at liberty to share that it was 33 representatives from the film industry. Still, she strongly hinted that one of them might be George Lucas, considering the former vice president of Lucasfilm, Howard Kazanjian, was on the Morning View team.
"We've been looking all over California for a city that gets it, and Dixon is one of the few cities that got it," Carissa Carpenter told the Dixon Tribune. "Dixon has been the opposite of most cities," she said. "Instead of saying we can't, they've been saying we can."
The proposed $2.8 billion studio project would be a big, quote, shot in the arm for the city of Dixon, city manager Kim Lindley admitted to the newspaper. When the idea first landed on their desks, local officials certainly had dollar signs parading in their heads. Morning View Studios would create 2,000 jobs in the city of Dixon.
Not to mention the temporary construction and union jobs it would require to build the place. Property values would skyrocket, as would property taxes, and the additional sales tax collected from tourist and gainfully employed workers could help transform Dixon into a world-class destination in Northern California. And it wouldn't cost the city anything. Morning View LLC had not asked the city of Dixon for any tax breaks or other incentives to build there.
Carissa Carpenter explained that Morning View was fully funded and financed. All preliminary planning was done, and engineering designs were drawn and ready to go.
All the company needed was a thumbs up from the city and they could start buying land and building the studio within six months. Things were moving fast. This is Dixon's Mayor Jack Batchelor a few weeks after the announcement. And we're here today in a part of the property that's under, or hope to be under contract for the Morning View Movie Studios.
This represents about 350 acres out of a total of over 500 acres. Not all 18,000 Dixonites were thrilled about having a major movie studio in their backyard. Many of the people in Dixon lived in Dixon to get 400 miles away from the Hollywood bullshit. The town was quaint and quiet, and that's the way a slight majority of people in Dixon wanted to keep it. Resistance to change had prevailed time and time again.
like when the choice to build a horse track landed on the ballot in 2007. 53% of voters voted no. The town also refused to allow Home Depot to build a store there, over fears that it would lead to the shuttering of Dixon's beloved mom-and-pop hardware store called Ace Hardware. But Morning View Studios was different. It's fair to say that a majority were in support of the potential new neighbor. Dixon business owners were already planning to relocate their services closer to the proposed studio site.
"Morning View Studios will probably forever be the most exciting thing to happen in Dixon, California," the locals say, at least until the asteroid. Carissa Carpenter was doing her part to drum up support. On August 16, 2012, she and her prominent team of Morning View consultants, lawyers, accountants, and architects held a meeting with Dixon landowners at the town's senior center. At that meeting, Morning View offered $50,000 per acre, more than double what the land was actually worth.
and Carissa Carpenter promised not to interfere with Dixon's natural charm, telling CBS Sacramento, quote, "It's hometown. It's non-Hollywood. It's Mayberry. It's a creative environment." "Yeah, but what about the noise?" someone at the meeting had asked. "What noise?" Carissa Carpenter replied. "According to the map you provided, the backlots sit directly under the flight path of big C-5 cargo jets practicing landings and takeoffs from close by Travis Air Force Base.
"Oh, that won't be a problem," Carissa assured. Because, quote, "we have ties to the White House. We can control the planes." There were also rail tracks nearby used by loud freight trains throughout the night. "Carissa Carpenter can probably control the trains, too," the Dixon landowners convinced themselves. Many signed non-binding letters of intent to sell, but the land would not yet go under contract.
Not until all of the landowners agreed to sell, and there were several holdouts, and everyone in town knew who they were. They could feel the glares in public. They received harassing phone calls and threats. "Why are you ruining this for everybody? Stop being selfish and greedy and sell your land."
In September 2012, Dixon City Council unanimously agreed to offer a letter of support for the project to help persuade the doubters. Dixon is committed to assisting Morning View in any way possible to expeditiously move the project forward. However, there was another threat on the horizon. Measure N. The Sunshine Ordinance was on the ballot in November 2012.
This initiative, if passed, will ensure governmental transparency. This ordinance will go beyond the minimum requirements of the Brown Act and Public Records Act and will provide more and quicker access to information and greater public access to the workings of Dixon City government. The Morning View team did not like this measure in ordinance. CEO Carissa Carpenter published a letter of opposition in the Dixon Tribune.
Measure N has created serious doubts about whether we can proceed with the studio project in Dixon. Our lawyers are telling us that Measure N undermines protections for confidential business information and trade secrets, which exist in state law but which would no longer apply in Dixon if Measure N passes. The best way to assure that Morning View Studios can move forward and quickly is to clear away the doubts by voting no on Measure N.
If it is going to affect us negatively, we will not purchase the land and will leave Dixon entirely. Measure N was defeated 69 to 31, but Morning View did not hit the ground running as Ms. Carpenter had promised in her letter. There wasn't much news to speak of as the holidays approached. None of the landowners had received formal contracts to sell. No new meetings or presentations were scheduled.
Carissa Carpenter blamed the lull on the landowner holdouts and derogatory rumors. Word had spread through Dixon that there was a Morning View Films based in San Francisco that produced nothing but gay porn. "Don't worry," Carissa Carpenter assured. "Morning View and Dixon would produce only family-friendly films." Another rumor suggested that Morning View was planning to bamboozle the city and build some kind of pollution factory instead of a movie studio. Clearly, someone was working against the project.
Carissa Carpenter was starting to feel unwelcome. That was okay. Around this time, Carissa Carpenter was forced to leave California for a while anyway. She told city manager Lindley that someone broke into her daughter's house in Fort Bragg, North Carolina and beat her to a pulp. Carissa said she needed to go to North Carolina to care for her grandchildren while their mother recovered in the hospital.
While Carpenter was away, in January 2013, Dixon City Council adopted a resolution requesting a $100,000 deposit from Morning View Studios for costs the city would incur during the land buying process. No deadline was given for payment.
Carissa Carpenter said the check was in the mail. We've arrived at an understanding on how we're going to proceed. They've been very cooperative with the city, with the city's needs. And in turn, we have been cooperative with their construction schedule and everything that they need to complete the project. By March 2013, it became clear that some landowners just weren't going to budge.
So, in order to fulfill its financing requirement of 300 acres, Morning View revised its plans by splitting the land into three different parcels: 219 acres in the city of Dixon, and the remainder would be purchased from Solano County. Finally, the project could move forward. On March 12, 2013, at a Dixon City Council meeting, Carissa Carpenter announced the good news. Carissa Carpenter: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
We did it. We got 300 acres. It is time for Morning View to move forward with the blessing of the city. I'm asking please, it's taken us 14 years and technically 16 and a half.
However, weeks after the meeting, there were still no contracts, no proof that the land was being purchased, nor had Morning View paid the $100,000 the city of Dixon requested, and the estimated completion date was pushed back six months. What exactly is happening here?
Two journalists at the Sacramento Bee, Sam Stanton and Margie Lundstrom, spent 10 weeks trying to answer the same question. I didn't know anything about this project. Margie Lundstrom, my partner at the Bee, got a tip that she should look into it. And so we started looking at clips, and naturally when you see $2.8 billion in
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Carissa Carpenter had grown up in show business. According to Carissa, she was one of the top three grossing international child actresses by the age of two. She claims she was signed with the William Morris Talent Agency, for whom she went to work for as an agent when she aged out of her initial career. William Morris has no record of Carissa.
Carissa moved to California to get back in front of the cameras sometime in her 20s. She attended modeling and acting school in Sacramento before moving to Los Angeles, where she settled into a new career as a casting agent. By then, Carissa had bigger dreams. Carissa Blix, as she was known back then, wanted to build her own movie studio. In the mid-90s, she pitched the idea to neighbors in Granite Bay, including Everett Parsons, a retired executive from Montgomery Ward.
Carissa promised Mr. Parsons the chief operating officer role of her Declaration Studios. In exchange, Mr. Parsons poured every penny of his retirement into the endeavor, as much as $400,000. He even gave his wife's car to Carissa and paid for her vacations. Declaration Studios never materialized. Neither did her following attempt to build a movie studio theme park in Sutter County. People like Everett Parsons, who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars with Carissa Blix, was never paid back.
In Carissa's opinion, she was technically working as a consultant for the studio projects, and the money that was invested was used to fairly compensate herself. She had no trouble sleeping at night. The failed studio mogul briefly used a different opportunity to rope in investors.
Carissa Carpenter stole the plans for a residential development outside of Stockton, California, renamed it, and began shopping it to investors in Utah. She raised over a million dollars and then blew it all. And of course, the development was never built.
In the early 2000s, Carissa Carpenter, now divorced, approached the city of Vallejo, California with her renewed idea of what she was now calling Mare Island Studios. She hinted that it would be a subsidiary of Lucasfilms. Carissa gave a formal presentation to city officials and handed out glossy brochures with maps and details. She introduced the reputable members of her team and even wrote a check for $50,000 so the city could hire a project manager.
But when the city of Vallejo demanded that Carissa Carpenter provide evidence of financing for the proposal, the enthusiastic CEO quietly disappeared. The city of Vallejo lost $10,000 entertaining the idea.
Carissa Carpenter lost nothing. In fact, she was living quite a charmed life on her investors' dimes. She bought a Mercedes Benz and expensive jewelry. She spent tens of thousands of dollars on dating services. And of course, she had to pay the accountants and architects who helped make her projects look legitimate. Carissa Carpenter might need to hire them again for future proposals.
that there was always a future proposal. Carissa Carpenter explored building a studio in Fairfield, California, but lost interest quickly. She tried to build an animation studio in South Carolina and even met with the governor. Ultimately, she failed to make a down payment on that land and disappeared again.
Her M.O. was the same every time: go through the motions of buying land for a film studio by assembling a team of reputable people who garner the confidence of the local government. Leverage that excitement to raise investment money until the projects inevitably fail.
then disappear off to the next town selling the same idea to another sucker who was trying to give their approval rating a boost. The Morning View and Carissa Carpenter have been very straightforward and answered all of our questions fully. Dixon, California was Carissa Carpenter's sixth attempt at building a studio.
But if you asked her, the past failures were never her fault. There were zoning issues, land acquisition issues, asbestos issues, not to mention her own rapidly failing health.
By Carissa Carpenter's own count, she's had 51 major health events since 1991. Pacemaker failures, ovarian cancer, two hysterectomies. She was constantly losing consciousness or being rushed to an emergency room. Carissa misses a lot of meetings and phone calls. She also misses a lot of payments. That's according to the documents unearthed by the SACB journalists Stanton and Lundstrom.
There were 19 local, state, and federal tax liens against Carissa Carpenter since 1992, and dozens of civil complaints from other individuals and companies who claimed she had ripped them off. For example, Carissa was facing two felony counts in Los Angeles for failing to pay for a stay at an exclusive Topanga Canyon bed and breakfast. Carissa sent numerous checks to the owner, but the associated bank accounts had already been closed.
She had performed similar financial misdeeds to acquire furniture, medical treatments, cosmetic dentistry, and care for her horses. Of course, you can't have a story about a place named Dixon without horses. In 2004, Carissa Carpenter also tried to buy an $18.5 million mansion in Beverly Hills, but her $550,000 down payment check bounced.
An ex-husband claims she stole $450,000 from him. An ex-boyfriend says he loaned his daughter's $12,000 college car fund to Carissa and she filed a restraining order against him when he asked for it back. This woman was a menace. But most disturbing of all is what Carissa Carpenter did to her own family. Carissa siphoned more than $34,000 from her 84-year-old grandmother's bank account to pay for horse riding lessons in London and a membership to a dating service.
No longer able to pay her bills, the grandmother was evicted from the assisted living facility where she lived. Luckily, Sacramento's Adopt an Elder Foundation kept Carissa's grandmother off the streets. But none of the other family members stepped in to help. "They're afraid to call me," the grandmother told a Sacramento Bee. "They think they're going to have to pay." A felony complaint was filed against Carissa Carpenter for stealing her grandmother's money, but the charges were dismissed when her grandmother died. These allegations were shocking.
What could Carissa Carpenter possibly have to say for herself? The Sacramento Bee journalists wanted to find out. In the spring of 2013, they called Carissa Carpenter and informed her they were doing a story about the Dixon movie studio. Carissa is never shy about being quoted in another puff piece. She agreed to an interview and reserved a table at a local TGI Friday's. Reporter Sam Stanton met her there.
She did. I spent a couple of hours with her at a TGI Fridays where she scheduled our lunch. And I spent the first hour talking about the project and the potential it had, the economic benefits it would bring to Dixon and to California. And then we spent about another hour talking about her background. And she...
Carissa Carpenter had an answer for everything. Stealing from her grandmother, Carissa said she could not pay her back because she was unconscious in Luxembourg.
The unpaid stay at Topanga Canyon? Carissa said her pacemaker broke before she could pay the bill.
The cosmetic dentistry.
health issues once again. Carissa Carpenter explained away every complaint against her. She was a victim of her own deteriorating body, it seemed. In other instances, it was identity theft that ruined her plans.
Let me explain, that's a fun one. When the identity theft happened,
the heavy duty identity theft happened. And I feel like I'm being, like, cross-examined. I don't want to have a negative relationship with you or anybody else. No. But I want... I understand. But you need to also understand that they are situations of life and if I would have known it would have taken me 15 years, 16 years to do this. And what it would have cost me to my family and my own sanity and health
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On June 1st, 2013, the Sacramento Bee published a front page story detailing Carissa Carpenter's shady past. Carissa Carpenter herself responded in the Facebook comments of the article in the same paragraph where she insisted she would not respond.
Quote,
even though George Lucas had already denied being involved with the project, telling Channel 13 in Sacramento, quote, Soon after, Carissa Carpenter's Morning View team started falling apart. Former Lucasfilms VP Howard Kazanjian resigned from his duties.
Per my employment agreement, I would be hired as Executive Vice President of Morning View Studios in the event of project funding. That agreement was terminated today as the project funding has not been met. Carissa Carpenter brushed off Kazanjian's resignation as a routine skirmish between the two. "Howard and I fight like cats and dogs," she told the Dixon Patch website. "I fire him, he fires me. He quits, I quit. We're like brothers and sisters."
Carissa Carpenter vowed to keep pursuing the Morning View Studios in Dixon. She even announced that she was considering doubling the price per acre offered to landowners to accelerate the process. But then nothing. Weeks passed and only a few minor updates had trickled in before they stopped entirely. Carissa Carpenter, as she's been known to do, disappeared.
Soon after, Dixon City officials were forced to defend themselves for falling prey to such an obvious phony.
How could they have not done any research on this person, many in the community wondered. A simple Google search would have raised multiple red flags. According to city manager Lindley, the standard protocol does not include researching the personal histories of those proposing a project. One of the things in this process that we do not do, and no city does as far as my knowledge is concerned, is we don't investigate people.
the principles. We don't look into the personal histories of the proposers, of the developer or the project initiator. What we do is we look at the project and see if it's viable, see if it comports with the law, see if it fits with the vision that the citizens of Dixon have for their city. And naturally we ask the city council if this is something that they would be interested in pursuing.
Carissa Carpenter's studio idea sounded good. And again, best of all, it cost the city of Dixon nothing. Mayor Jack Batchelor was unapologetic about pursuing the project. I make no apologies. I haven't done anything behind the scenes or put the city in jeopardy. No money from this city has been spent or given to the Morning View people. And I want to make that crystal clear.
With Dixon California in the rearview mirror of her recently purchased pre-owned Toyota Corolla, in early 2014, Carissa Carpenter resurfaced with her studio idea in Sparks, Nevada, outside of Reno. Her new project was never considered because Dixon's former economic development manager tipped off the local officials.
Federal authorities were watching too. They had been investigating Carissa Carpenter since the Sacramento Bee published its exposé of her. She was finally arrested in November 2014 in Venice and charged with 32 felony counts including mail fraud, wire fraud, and making a false statement to a government agent. Carissa Carpenter was accused of scamming investors out of more than $5 million over 17 years and spending all of the funds on herself.
Carissa Carpenter pleaded not guilty and was released on a $25,000 bond, partially borrowed from her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. Out on bail, Carissa immediately got back to work. She started fundraising for a new movie using the name Lady Carissa, which had been bestowed upon her after she became a member of the Knights Templar and purchased a $700 cloak that would grant her diplomatic immunity and protect her from prosecution.
Carissa Carpenter borrowed that $700 from her landlord on top of the $20,000 he had already loaned her which she used to hire a special international Australian lawyer connected to the Rockefeller family that turned out to be some guy that worked at a pizza restaurant.
Carissa also traveled to New York to raise money for her new film project and contacted people she had scammed in the past. Both were violations of her parole. On August 31, 2017, her bail was revoked and she was taken into custody.
It had been nearly three years since Carissa Carpenter had been indicted. She had successfully delayed proceedings by hiring and firing three different defense attorneys who, according to Carissa, had been paid off by Wells Fargo in an attempt to frame her and bully her into signing what she called a dirty plea deal. Carissa accused the bankers of cutting her break lines, hacking her email, and trying to kill her.
Even behind bars, Carissa Carpenter slowed the process by continuously putting forth motions to be released from jail on bail again. In one dramatic hearing on December 21, 2017, Carissa turned to her court-appointed attorney and told him, quote, I'm going to be dead. They don't care. And then she appeared to faint and fell face-first onto the defense table. But against all odds, Carissa Carpenter survived, and eventually she signed the plea deal, but not before fainting again.
On July 6, 2018, at a hearing where Carissa, now 55 years old, was supposed to sign the plea agreement, she passed out dramatically. A team of paramedics wheeled her out of the 13th floor courtroom on a stretcher and into an ambulance waiting on the street below.
The hearing was postponed for a week. Carissa finally pleaded guilty to two counts of mail fraud and one count of lying to a government agent, but not before launching a GoFundMe asking for $100,000 to, quote, help Carissa stop bank corruption. I was due to testify against Wells Fargo and their fraudulent banking scandal, Carissa writes, and the very next day, the FBI raided my home, which prevented me from doing so.
In November 2018, Carissa Carpenter was sentenced to six and a half years in prison and ordered to pay more than $3.6 million in restitution. "I pray my family in heaven can help me somehow repair and mend what I've broken. I have no one to blame but myself. It became my obsession. It was who I was." "Who is Carissa Carpenter now?" you ask.
a free woman. She was released from prison early on October 1, 2020, after only serving a little more than two years of her sentence because she contracted COVID-19. A judge ruled that Carpenter's age and health made her high risk, noting that she has reportedly had nine heart attacks, six pacemaker surgeries, and two blood clot surgeries. Carissa Carpenter is reportedly currently living in a 600-square-foot home in Big Bear, owned by her new boyfriend.
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