Parent receives 7-month sentence
She had pleaded guilty in college admissions scandal.
Elizabeth Henriquez, a Bay Area mother who conspired to fix her daughters’ college test scores and buy a Georgetown tennis coach’s fraudulent endorsement, was sentenced Tuesday to seven months in prison.
Henriquez pleaded guilty last year alongside her husband, Manuel, to conspiring to commit fraud and money laundering with William “Rick” Singer, the Newport Beach consultant at the center of the college admissions scandal. On five occasions, the couple acknowledged, Singer’s accomplices fed their two daughters the answers to their SAT and ACT exams while pretending to proctor the tests.
The couple also paid $400,000 for a Georgetown tennis coach to endorse their older daughter as a talented tennis player, which she was not.
In addition to the sevenmonth prison term, U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton ordered Henriquez to pay a $200,000 fine. To protect the participants from the coronavirus, the sentencing hearing was conducted by videoconference.
Prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston, who charged the Henriquezes and 51 others in Singer’s scheme, had asked Gorton to send Elizabeth Henriquez to prison for 26 months — the longest sentence they’d requested in the case to date. Aaron Katz, Henriquez’s lead attorney, had proposed a sentence of home confinement and probation.
Katz cited the coronavirus outbreak as a factor weighing in favor of house arrest, rather than incarceration.
Henriquez “knew that what she was doing was wrong,” her attorney wrote, that this “was not a true, let along legal, way of expressing her deep, unconditional, abiding parental love.”
Eric Rosen, the lead prosecutor in the case, said Henriquez should be allowed to delay her surrender to serve her term, but her crimes nevertheless demanded “a meaningful sentence of imprisonment.”
Manuel Henriquez, the former chairman of a publicly traded venture capital firm, will be sentenced next week; prosecutors have asked for an 18month sentence.