Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin Have Been Charged in a Huge College Admissions Scandal
LORI LOUGHLIN andFELICITY HUFFMANcould be in big trouble. They just got busted as part of a massive, nationwide college admissions scandal . . . the biggest one our justice department has EVER investigated.
They're calling it "Operation Varsity Blues". The official charges against both of them are "conspiracy to commit mail fraud" and "honest services mail fraud".
Here's what was happening in a nutshell: A man named William Singer set up a fake charity that rich people would pay into. In exchange, he would fraudulently get their kids into some of the top schools in the country.
How would he do it? Sometimes with straight-up bribes. But Singer would also help students cheat on college entrance exams . . . or he'd even fake ATHLETIC CREDIENTIALS for them.
And that often included staging photo shoots of the student "playing" a sport . . . or taking pictures of another athlete and PHOTOSHOPPING THEIR FACE on them.
People were paying from thousands to MILLIONS of dollars to get their kids into schools like Georgetown, UCLA, USC, Stanford, Wake Forest, Yale, and others. Singer has been running this scam since 2011.
Huffman . . . who you'd probably know best from"Desperate Housewives", reportedly paid $15,000 tohelpher eldest daughter out. What happened was that after she took the SAT, a proctor secretly CORRECTED her wrong answers.
They almost didn't get the proctor they wanted though. The feds have an email Felicity wrote to Singer in 2017 that says, quote, "Ruh Ro! Looks like [my daughter's high school] wants to provide own proctor." (!!!)
Felicity and her husbandWILLIAM H. MACYtalked to Singer about doing it again for their younger daughter, but decided not to.
Macy was NOT charged, but that's kind of atechnicality. They have evidence that he participated in talks for the younger daughter . . . but that transaction never went through.
As for Lori Loughlin, she and her husband Mossimo Giannulli BOTH got nailed. They allegedly paid $500,000 to have their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team . . . even though neither of them participated in the sport.
The Feds say they just sent the school pictures of the girls on ROWING MACHINES.
(Sounds like if these two don't get a good lawyer, they're gonna have an EMPTIER HOUSE pretty soon.)
Charges have been filed against dozens of people, including exam administrators, school athletic coaches, and parents. It's not clear if they'll go after any of the KIDS. And the colleges themselves seem to be off the hook. At least for now.
Felicity was reportedlyarrestedby FBI agentswith their GUNS DRAWNearly yesterday morning. Herbondwas set at $250,000, and she was ordered to surrender her passport. (Here's Macy showing up for herhearing.)
Lori would have received the same treatment, but she was out of the country. She's expected to surrendertoday.
(If you want to take a deep dive into this chaos, you can see the names of everyone who was charged and read the full complainthere.)