Netflix has had phenomenal success in several of its documentary projects, with true-crime series like Making a Murderer which explore the criminal justice in meticulous detail, while others serve up the kind of hugely entertaining true stories that are so bizarre you couldn’t make them up: think Bad Vegan, The Tinder Swindler, and of course, the viral smash that was Tiger King.
The streaming platform has just debuted another docu-series in the vein of the latter, a stranger-than-fiction account of a German Shepherd who bears the title of the “richest dog in the world.” Meet Gunther. And his millions.
When the four-part series begins, viewers are told the tale of Karlotta Liebenstein, a German Countess and animal lover who left her considerable fortune to her dog, a German Shepherd named Gunther the Third. Karlotta and her husband had made their millions through his pharmaceutical company, but they had no direct family when they died, and so Karlotta left everything in their will to Gunther.
That estate—totalling around $80 million—has remained with Gunther’s descendants, passing from one generation of pooch to the next, each of whom enjoy a life of luxury that most human beings can only dream about. A dog’s life, in Gunther’s case, includes private yachts, and a mansion in Miami that was reportedly once owned by Madonna, and a staff of 27 human handlers who tend to Gunther’s every whim.
But the truth is a little more complicated than that.
The real story of Gunther’s Millions
As the series unfolds, we learn that Karlotta Leibenstein never existed. She was, in fact, a fabrication of pharma heir Maurizio Mian, who has been using the decades-long hoax as a way of enjoying the good life without having to pay the tax that would usually go with it.
The Karlotta shown in a black-and-white photograph in an early episode of the documentay is actually an unnamed friend of Mian’s mother, who helped handle the family’s finances. The original Gunther, meanwhile, belonged to Mian’s girlfriend at the time, Antonella Signorini. Mian was exceptionally fond of Gunther, and when the dog got sick, he treated him with osteoporosis medication which seemed to cure him, creating great PR for his pharmaceutical company.
That was when Mian came up with the idea of creating a fictional German heiress, and putting Gunther at the center of the story as a “financial artifice for taxes.”
And the rest—sportscars, private planes, servants, orgies and all—is history.
Philip Ellis is a freelance writer and journalist from the United Kingdom covering pop culture, relationships and LGBTQ+ issues. His work has appeared in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV.
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