Admissions fraud scheme fueled by wealthy parents
LOS ANGELES — When it came to getting their daughters into college, actress Lori Loughlin and fashion designer J. Mossimo Giannulli were taking no chances.
The wealthy, glamorous couple were determined their girls would attend the University of Southern California, a highly competitive school that offers seats only to a fraction of the thousands of students who apply each year.
So they turned to William Singer and the “side door” the Newport Beach businessman said he had built into USC and other highly sought after universities. Half a million dollars later — $400,000 of it sent to Singer and $100,000 to an administrator in USC’s vaunted athletic program — the girls were enrolled at the school. Despite having never competed in crew, both had been given coveted slots reserved for rowers who were expected to join the school’s team.
“This is wonderful news!” Loughlin emailed Singer after receiving word that a spot for her second
daughter had been secured. She added a high-five emoji.
According to a sweeping criminal investigation into fraudulent college admissions unveiled Tuesday, Loughlin and Giannulli are among at least dozens of families who paid huge sums to take advantage of Singer’s audacious scheme to gain access to exclusive schools through bribes and lies.
Federal investigators said they have charged 50 people in the case, including the USC administrator who helped Loughlin’s kids, and accomplices whom Singer allegedly paid to rig college admission test scores — as well as coaches at USC, UCLA, Stanford and Yale.
The charges stunned the upper echelons of American academia, heightening debate about the advantages the ultra-rich enjoy in accessing the country’s best colleges amid intense competition in which merit alone is not enough to assure admission, even for students with perfect gradepoint averages and stellar resumes. The accusations also raised serious questions about how university admissions officials, athletic departments and others could have allowed such blatant fraud to go undetected.
There was particular upheaval at USC, a campus already reeling from several scandals. Prosecutors alleged that a top athletic department leader as well as three current and former coaches accepted nearly $2 million in bribes to get students into the school.
The case names celebrities, corporate executives, investment bankers, business owners, top-tier lawyers, and even a best-selling author of parenting books. They sought Singer out from different parts of the country, but with one overriding goal: To get their children into the best colleges.
Andrew E. Lelling, the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, called the defendants “a catalog of wealth and privilege.”
Loughlin and Giannulli face charges, as well as actress Felicity Huffman and 30 other parents accused of hiring Singer to get their children into desired schools.
FBI agents took Huffman into custody early Tuesday morning at her home in Los Angeles. She was led away in handcuffs and taken to a federal holding facility downtown along with 11 others, authorities said. She spent hours in detention before being freed on $250,000 bond during a hearing in a courtroom where her husband, actor William H. Macy, looked on. An attorney for Huffman declined to comment on the charges.
In announcing the charges, Lelling said the yearlong investigation is the largest of its kind in the country and left open the possibility that charges against more people could follow.
Singer, 58, pleaded guilty Tuesday in a Boston courtroom to racketeering and other charges as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors. He admitted to collecting more than $25 million between 2011 and February this year in a two-pronged scheme in which parents could pay tens of thousands of dollars to have an expert test-taker on Singer’s payroll take their children’s college admission tests or write larger checks to buy spots that colleges reserve for athletes.
A law enforcement official familiar with the probe but not authorized to discuss it publicly said federal authorities had gone to several prominent high schools in Southern California seeking records related to students whose parents were believed to have hired Singer.
In phone conversations with parents secretly recorded by agents, Singer boasted he had helped more than 850 students of the wealthy and powerful to lie their way into colleges in just two years. Lelling said that in some of the cases known to investigators the children were aware of the con carried out on their behalf, but that others were kept in the dark by their parents.