Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli will be sentenced on Friday, and so prosecutors are making their final pitch to Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton for their sentencing recommendations. Justin D. O’Connell, an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston, has laid out the argument in a memo for the judge: Giannulli should get more prison time than Loughlin, after they together paid a total of $500,000 to get their daughters into the University of Southern California as bogus crew recruits.
That’s not news per se; prosecutors recommended five months for him and just two months for her when they each flipped their pleas to guilty for one count of fraud in May. Giannulli was, O’Connell argues, the more “active participant in the scheme,” making the payments and taking the infamous photos on the rowing machine. There’s just a little more information on how, in the prosecutor’s words, Giannulli steamrolled “an honest high school counselor who tried to do the right thing” and how both made their daughters “complicit in crime.”
In the charging documents from last year, it was apparent that Olivia Jade had been CC’d on at least one email with ringleader William “Rick” Singer. The memo adds that Olivia’s parents guided her through the process, especially how to handle a potential whistleblower: the high school’s counselor. It describes Loughlin as “complicit” in the fraud, accusing her of “eagerly enlisting Singer a second time for her younger daughter, and coaching her daughter not to ‘say too much’ to her high school’s legitimate college counselor, lest he catch onto their fraud.”
When Olivia asked her mom if she should list USC as a top choice for college, Loughlin called the counselor a “weasel” who could “meddle” in the plan. She advised her daughter, “Don’t say too much to that man.”
Again, the prosecution has said Giannulli was the main communicator with Singer and that he had intimidated a counselor who questioned Olivia’s recruitment to USC, appearing at the school to confront the man over, in the counselor’s words, “why I was trying to ruin or get in the way of their opportunities.” Singer’s contact within the athletic department left a voicemail with Singer and asked him to tell parents not to show up unannounced on school campuses to yell at counselors (the administrator has pleaded not guilty to conspiring to commit racketeering, fraud, and bribery, whereas Singer has pleaded guilty to four felonies). All this and more is why they’ve requested a more severe sentence for the former Target designer.
Giannulli and Loughlin are scheduled to be sentenced in Boston on Friday, which will mark the beginning of the end for most famous of those parents implicated in the college admissions scandal.
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