[jerednel]

Well also, on pretty much every brokerage, if you get assigned a leg of a spread while your position is ITM then your balance drops through the floor far beyond what your max loss is. But that's just temporary until you close the position fully.

I would hope that isn't what happened here because he could have just closed the other side of the assigned leg and accepted a much more modest loss.

edit: this is where a standard brokerage shines. when this first happened to me i called TDA and they walked me through how to get out of my shitty position. Not sure you can do the same with RH.