Just when you though the college admissions cheating scandal couldn’t get any dumber, TMZ revealed that Olivia Jade, the “influencer” daughter of actress Lori Loughlin, was on the yacht of Rick Caruso, the chairman of USC’s Board of Trustees, as the Department of Justice initiated their RICO crackdown and issued 50 indictments, including of Loughlin and Jade’s father, Mossimo Giannulli.
As a sheer tableau vivant, the teenage pseudo-celebrity who made her name hawking cheap sponsored content on a tacky Instagram account spending spring break in the Bahamas on the yacht of a board chairman of a school she bribed her way into is pristinely infuriating enough. But it’s even worse if you understand who Rick Caruso is and why his past year of performance exemplifies the core corruption corroding USC from the top down.
Why Jade was on the yacht was fairly innocuous, at least comparatively speaking. Caruso’s daughter Gianna, a fellow “influencer” who goes by Gigi, and Jade are friends and sorority sisters at USC. It raises one obvious question of why Jade didn’t just use her clout with the Carusos or a number of famous families on the board that her own parents surely had connections to.
But the true scandal isn’t that rich girls at USC bound together to find rich boyfriends and occasionally go to class. It’s that Caruso came to become the chairman to clean house after Nikias resigned in disgrace from his presidency after the George Tyndall scandal and Caruso replaced John Mork, a close personal friend of Nikias.
Caruso, a billionaire real estate magnate and USC alum, promised to herald in a new era of increased transparency and accountability. Multiple prominent figures in the USC community privately expressed relief to me that with Mork, who reserves power of attorney over Nikias and his wife in case of their incapacitation, was out. Caruso, viewed as Los Angeles royalty outside of the Pacific Palisades — where many of the residents resent his real estate developments — was hardly a radical choice. Before Nikias resigned, Caruso issued an extremely milquetoast “if the allegations are true” style statement. But of the board’s 53 members, Caruso was only one of three to publicly address the mass molestation of the university’s students at the hands of the campus gynecologist. Caruso also famously banned President Trump from his mall, the Grove, putting him at odds with a great deal of the board’s members, such as Tom Barrack and Miriam Adelson, who have close personal ties to the president.
But Caruso’s proven himself as anything but a renegade in his nine months as Chairman. He failed to fire Vice President of Student Affairs Ainsley Carry, who brokered the hush money payout to Tyndall and refused to report him to the Medical Board or law enforcement. And Caruso has allowed the incompetent interim president, Wanda M. Austin, to start a civil war in the Marshall School of Business.
Under the tenure of Dean James Ellis, Marshall’s global MBA ranking catapulted from #73 to #46 and it became the first major business school in the country to achieve complete gender parity in student admissions. Ellis was about as woke, successful, and beloved as any dean at the university, yet Austin decided to scalp him in the name of diversity.
In December, just two months after Ellis received a $70,000 performance bonus, Austin announced the dean’s termination, effective June 30 of this year. Austin failed to publicly detail why she fired Ellis, but it came as a result of a report from the Office of Equity and Diversity, the same office which conducted a performative review of Tyndall in which they interviewed a single student and found him not guilty to serially molesting hundreds, if not thousands of students.
The school’s top donors revolted.
“There was no evidence or conclusion from any documents I read that there was racial, sexual or aging discrimination at the Marshall School or by Dean Ellis or his senior administrators,” said Ming Hsieh, a trustee who’s donated $85 million to USC and read thousands of pages of records regarding Ellis, including the Office of Equity and Diversity.
Lloyd Greif, another top donor and defender of Ellis, wrote in a leaked letter to the board, “the handful of trustees who have been permitted to review the Cooley report have variously described it as ‘weak,’ ‘made as instructed,’ ‘garbage in and garbage out,’ ‘junk’ and ‘a piece of sh*t. They have all stated that it does not provide any reasonable grounds for terminating Jim,” referring the report written by Cooley LLP, USC’s external law firm.
After a Board of Trustees meeting shorting after Austin announced Ellis’ termination, Edward Roski, another board member and billionaire, excoriated Caruso in a letter for him and Austin cutting off Hsieh, who asked for ten minutes to defend Ellis, to one minute.
“This new chairman and new interim president talk about transparency and responsibility,” Hsieh told a student news outlet. “They never do anything. They are hiding dirty work under the rug.”
So rather than fire the entire office of Equity and Diversity which enabled Tyndall’s reign of terror in the first place, Caruso and Austin have listened to a report than smells a lot more like political optics and expedience than actual truth. How convenient to fire one old white guy rather than the dozens of administrators who covered for not only Tyndall, but now Dennis Kelly, yet another campus doctor who dozens of gay male students allege sexually abused them. The students are suing both Kelly, who spent 20 years seeing USC students, and the university itself for allegedly silencing complaints and issuing, you guessed it, a hush money payout to get him to leave.
It’s possible that Caruso had no idea that Jade bribed her way into USC. But considering the tight-knit nature of USC’s athletics, is it likely that athletic director Lynn Swann had no idea that multiple students would show up on rosters but then not to practice? And then if Swann did know, isn’t it extremely probable that he’d ask the person with the most financial interest in the school, the Chairman of the Board, if it would be worth firing one of the most prestigious coaches at the school for a little racketeering conspiracy? Given Caruso’s tolerance for outright corruption under her nose, the odds are a little less in his favor than they would be otherwise.
An argument against this is the simple fact that most people probably wouldn’t want someone directly linked to federal crimes on his yacht. But Caruso’s been fine hosting underage scandal on his 216-foot yacht before. Just three years ago, white Brentwood School students were caught on camera aboard Caruso’s boat singing the n-word. What’s a little entertainment of a possible RICO crook?
After the RICO crackdown, Caruso played the victim, literally blaming the four employees indicted for “victim[izing] USC.”
Jade’s off the yacht now, and her relationship with the Carusos is likely over. Not that it matters much anymore. The school says it will be the interim president, not Caruso, to make the final call over Jade’s fate.
