In shocking news, Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged nearly 50 people — including Hollywood actresses and coaches at top universities such as Yale, Standford, and USC — for paying for or in some cases, taking bribes to admit student applicants.
At a news conference in Boston on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Andrew E. Lelling called the case the largest college admissions scandal ever prosecuted by the Justice Department.
In some cases, parents paid bribes up to $6 million to get their children into Ivy league Universities. According to Federal documents, the children were not in on the schemes. (Which calls into question the choice by some media outlets to run photos of the offspring.)
Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman.
Along with some rich parents, Hollywood stars Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman were caught in the snare. In their case, Loughlin and Giannulli ‘agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team – despite the fact that they did not participate in crew – thereby facilitating their admission to USC,’ according to the documents.
The report names athletic coaches from Yale, Stanford, USC, Wake Forest and Georgetown, among others, as well as parents and exam administrators.
Yale.
‘Beginning in or about 2011, and continuing through the present, the defendants — principally individuals whose high-school age children were applying to college — conspired with others to use bribery and other forms of fraud to facilitate their children’s admission to colleges and universities in the District of Massachusetts and elsewhere, including Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California, and the University of Southern California — Los Angeles,’ stated the 200 page document that was filed on Tuesday.