A fashion tech entrepreneur has been ordered to serve time in prison after her ridiculous excuse for defrauding investors crumpled in court.
On Thursday, Christine Hunsicker, former CEO of the “clothing-as-a-service” startup CaaStle was sentenced to five years in prison for committing nearly $300 million in fraud, the Financial Times reports.
As part of Hunsicker’s defense, her lawyers tried to argue that the fraud stemmed from a traumatic brain injury after a “thirty-pound” mirror fell on her head. During the trial, a doctor testified on the CEO’s behalf that had she not been injured, she would “not have engaged in the fraud.”
On top of that, FT reports that her attorneys tried to argue that the injury “eliminated executive functioning,” and conveniently erased her memory from the years 2020, 2021, and 2022, the years Hunsicker allegedly committed fraud. Even absent the head trauma, the defense tried to establish that she was pathologically geared to succeed at all costs while avoiding conflict and that she had an addictive relationship to gambling which “took over” after the mirror smashed her head.
Addressing the court, Hunsicker said she just “started lying about numbers not to enrich myself but to avoid conflict.”
Though the baffling defense was only partially effective, Hunsicker didn’t do herself any favors. Her years as head of CaaStle were full of hilariously incriminating Google searches like “created an audit firm fake” and “bank fraud vs wire fraud severity.”
CaaStle collapsed spectacularly in June of last year after suspicious investors uncovered Hunsicker had grossly misrepresented the company’s revenue by as much as 70 times more than the actual figure.
Though the judge made a wild concession that the mirror was “real” and “contributed” to Hunsicker’s fraud, she was nonetheless ordered to report for her prison sentence starting in October.
She’ll likewise have to pay her victims back, to the tune of $283 million per person.
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