Loughlin sentenced to 2 months in prison
By Hollywood standards, the downfall had already been steep. After being implicated in the nation’s largest college admissions prosecution, Lori Loughlin resigned from her exclusive country club, downsized from her expansive Bel Air estate and saw her acting career crater. Then, Friday, Loughlin was sentenced to prison.
As a federal judge ordered Loughlin to serve two months behind bars for her role in the admissions scandal, he expressed astonishment that someone who had what he called “a fairy-tale life” would corrupt the college admissions system out of a desire for even more status and prestige.
Loughlin, who has acknowledged conspiring to pass her daughters off as rowers so they would be admitted to the University of Southern California, tearfully apologized. She said she had believed that she was acting out of love for her children but that she now realized she had only undermined them, as well as contributed to inequities in society.
“That realization weighs heavily on me,” Loughlin said, “and while I wish I could go back and do things differently, I can only take responsibility and move forward.”
Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, had both pleaded guilty to fraud. Prosecutors have said that they paid $500,000 as part of the scheme. Prosecutors said Giannulli took a more active role in the fraud, and the judge sentenced Giannulli on Friday to five months in prison.
Loughlin and Giannulli had fought the charges for more than a year. At times, the focus on the boldfaced names — which also included actress Felicity Huffman and Douglas Hodge, former chief executive of Pimco — eclipsed larger questions about inequities in the admissions process.
In response to the scandal, some colleges and universities have drawn new lines between fundraising and admissions or athletic recruitment. Others put in place safeguards to ensure that students admitted as athletes are, in fact, athletes.
For all of the changes, however, the nation’s largest college admissions prosecution, which federal authorities called Operation Varsity Blues, did not spur as sweeping an overhaul to the admissions system at elite schools as some had expected.