Chris & Erin Mazzei
California filmmakers · Parents of four
They pleaded guilty, and this page will not soften that. What follows is one fact, stated because it is unusual and because it is documented.
Their filings under 28 U.S.C. §2255 state that roughly $1,147,754 — about 84 percent of the loss — had been repaid before they were sentenced, and that they could have repaid every remaining dollar had they been permitted to draw on more than a million dollars of equity in their own home. The court did not permit it. Those figures come from the Mazzeis’ own filings and have not been adopted by a court.
Most federal fraud defendants repay nothing before sentencing. Repayment usually happens afterwards, slowly, out of prison wages and then out of whatever work a person can find with a felony conviction. Eighty-four percent, paid in advance, is not the ordinary pattern.
Erin has served her sentence. Chris reports to federal custody on August 20, 2026. Their four children have not had both parents at home at the same time since.
Why this case is on this site
This project does not claim the Mazzeis are innocent, and this page does not ask anyone to believe they are. They admitted what they did, in open court, and the government’s own account of it is linked below without edit.
The forty-three people on this site do not share a verdict. The government won some of these cases and lost others. What they share is a question that a verdict does not answer: once the process was over, did the punishment fit the person. Three things put the Mazzeis in that company, and each of them is on the record.
The money was going back, and the court stopped it. Most of it had already been repaid before sentencing. The rest, by their account, was sitting in their own house, and they were not permitted to reach it. A father of four reports to federal prison on August 20 over a debt he says he was ready to pay in full, in advance, out of his own equity.
The children serve it twice. Erin’s twenty-seven months ran first. Chris’s thirty-six begin next week. Four children will have spent something close to five years with one parent gone — first their mother, then their father. Nothing in the law required the terms to run one after the other rather than together.
They did the two things the system says it rewards. Federal sentencing gives formal credit for accepting responsibility and for making victims whole. They pleaded guilty and they repaid most of the loss before they were sentenced — and it is hard to identify, from the outside, what that credit amounted to here. That is the question this page will answer properly once the sentencing transcript is in hand.
Clemency is not a finding of innocence. It is the power to look at a whole case at once, after the courts are finished, and decide whether the sentence still makes sense. That is the only thing being asked for here.
Why this page is short
The rest of this account is not written yet, and it is not published until it is checked.
Every case page on this site is built from court filings rather than from a summary written by a supporter. It prints the facts that cut against the person alongside the ones that do not, because a page that omits them is worth nothing to anyone.
That work is not finished here. The docket has not been read in full, the sentencing transcript is not yet in hand, and the government’s own account has not been set out beside theirs. Until it is, this page says only what is verified and stops.
What is not in doubt is the date. On August 20, 2026 a father of four reports to federal prison.
If you have documents
The record
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