The only question more baffling than how the uber-wealthy parents prosecuted in the college admissions fraud crackdown managed to mess up their crimes is why they had to resort to crime at all. Why couldn’t they just follow the kakistocratic method of the Kushners and the Kennedys and just donate a library and host a few benefits? Why go through all the struggles and stunts to pretend your beauty-vlogger daughter is in fact a Division I-quality coxswain?
Well, the question became all the more confounding after federal prosecutors dumped emails from the Operation Varsity Blues case, proving nearly as damning for the University of Southern California as they are for actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, designer Mossimo Giannulli.
Mere months into Loughlin and Giannulli’s machinations with mastermind Rick Singer to stage their elder daughter, Bella Giannulli, as an athletic recruit for USC, the university’s development office reached out to Giannulli directly to grease the wheels for her admission.
“Please let me know if I can be at all helpful in setting up a 1:1 opportunity for her, customized tour of campus for the family, and/or classroom visit? I’d also be happy to flag her application,” the unnamed official wrote to Giannulli in September 2016. After he deflected the email in a few exchanges, the official followed up with a wink and nudge that they could discuss his possible “philanthropy or participation in [USC’s] mentorship programs.”
Despite USC’s repeated refutations, the Varsity Blues scandal has blown the cover off of what everyone has known for years. Rich applicants and, more importantly, famous applicants earned special treatment with financial and publicity pledges. While top universities reportedly require around $10 million these days to be swayed, documents obtained by the prosecution found that USC routinely flagged applications from mere five-figure donors. If Giannulli and Loughlin were already willing to cough up half a million to illegally buy their daughters’ ways in, why wouldn’t they have just doubled that to slap their name on a library wing and avoid the whole federal crime thing?
Prosecutors, who are rumored to consider prosecuting the students on the grounds that they were knowingly complicit in Singer’s scheme, are baffled by Giannulli and Loughlin’s decision. But given their insistence that the school they bought be USC, Occam’s razor gives us a hint: They didn’t want anyone knowing their daughters just weren’t good enough.
Singer bought sophomoric students ways into far more superior schools than USC, but Giannulli and Loughlin were insistent that their intellectually deficient daughters attend the Los Angeles campus anyway. They wanted to buy their way into the new-money cesspool of the Hollywood half of California’s elite. That meant USC, and USC knew it. That was Giannulli and Loughlin’s pride before the fall, and now, everyone knows they couldn’t even correctly crime their way to perceived prestige.
