Loughlin and husband due in Hub court
Set to appear Friday for their sentencing
Toppled Hollywood actress Lori Loughlin and her husband should start packing for prison.
In a stinging memorandum, federal prosecutors said Monday duping the University of Southern California into admitting their daughters as fake crew recruits — and “steamrolling an honest” high school counselor who questioned it all — warrants “meaningful terms of incarceration.”
Both Loughlin, 55, and her designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli, 56, face sentencing Friday in Boston. Federal Judge Nathaniel Gorton said he’d rule before then on whether he will accept a plea deal that calls for two months in prison for Loughlin, five months for Giannulli.
Loughlin, best known for playing Aunt Becky on the 1990s sitcom “Full House” and Abigail in the Hallmark series “When Calls the Heart,” must also pay a $150,000 fine and do 100 hours of community service. Giannulli’s suggested fine is $250,000 and he must complete 250 hours of community service — if the judge OKs the deal.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling and his team wrote Monday the plea deal is “sufficient, but not greater than necessary.”
Lelling’s team goes over the bribery both parents pleaded guilty to, stating Loughlin and Giannulli pumped $500,000 into winning two coveted slots at USC for their daughters as crew members. At one point, the prosecutors state, a high school counselor in California who questioned the ruse was “confronted” by Giannulli “to prevent the scheme from being discovered, brazenly lying about his daughter’s athletic abilities.”
The feds add: “The crime Giannulli and Loughlin committed was serious. Over the course of two years they engaged twice in (mastermind Rick) Singer’s fraudulent scheme. They involved both their daughters in the fraud, directing them to pose in staged photographs for use in fake athletic profiles and instructing one daughter how to conceal the scheme from her high school counselor.”
The prosecutors say an angry Giannulli at one point called the doubting counselor a “nosey bastard.”
The parents had their daughters stage photos on rowing machines during bogus workouts. The high school counselor also questioned how one of the daughters had time for crew in between all her social media posts.
Loughlin and Giannulli argued, unsuccessfully, that college admissions scam mastermind Rick Singer was coached by the FBI to lie.
The California couple will likely serve their time — when a vaccine for the coronavirus may still not be available — in a federal prison near their Los Angeles home, a Golden State lawyer told the Herald the day the couple pleaded guilty.