Matt Murphy

you know a hundred thousand turned into two hundred thousand turned three pretty soon this is a substantial amount of money enough that it attracted the attention of the district attorney's office in riverside county there's a criminal investigation and as you can imagine a whole slew of lawsuits over this missing money meanwhile chris is um he's almost learning about this in real time because he worked for a different company when he met ed

And he's he signed on for this.

He's totally unaware of it.

Now, all of a sudden, there's lawsuits where as as partner, he's being named as a co-defendant.

And this idyllic kind of awesome surfer lifestyle suddenly has this huge injection of stress.

And he's not sure he's not sure, you know.

how much how much of this is going to drag him down how much his company is liable for it now and remember all this money and he's his his brother has moved down he's invested in the future bringing his family down so chris decides he wants to protect his interests and essentially what the arrangement was chris was the creative guy so he would work he'd surf in the mornings and then he'd work late into the night doing these the creative end of these advertising campaigns and

ed was the business guy so ed actually owned 55 percent of the business and chris trusted him so it was like hey you handle the books you handle the business side i'll do all the campaigns together we'll combine our talents we'll make money for ourselves instead of these other companies that was the idea so now um chris has no access to the books

And he's concerned that that this is going to drag him down.

He's worried about his reputation.

He's worried about all kinds of like the professional implications of this.

But then he the criminal case progresses to a point that Ed Sheeran actually pleads guilty to embezzlement.

And he's ordered by a Superior Court judge in Riverside County to pay back $700,000.

And he's given five months to do it, which is unusual.

And he's allowed to do some custody time on weekends.

But he's essentially allowed to remain free so that he can operate his business.

But there is there's a sentence hanging over his head of 16 months in state prison.

So he's going to do what that means in California, depending on our crazy legislature.

You're going to do at least 50 percent of that time and depending on the way it's charged, up to 80 percent.

So he's looking at at least eight months actual prison time.