Prosecutors Say That Lori Loughlin Rejected A Legitimate Opportunity To Get Her Kids Into USC

Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli continue to fight the accusation that they paid $500,000 to Varsity Blues ringleader Rick Singer and staged fake rowing pictures to get their daughters Olivia and Isabella Giannulli into USC. Lori and Mossimo’s legal team don’t deny the payment or the pictures. Instead, their defense has included the claim that the pictures were never sent to USC, that they’re the victims of a scam themselves, that they weren’t bribing, but fundraising, and that they thought their $500,000 was going towards a charity for underprivileged children. Prosecutors just did the impossible by finding a way to make Lori and Mossimo look even more unethical.

Page Six reports that court documents were filed on Tuesday by prosecutors, in which they allege Lori and Mossimo had every opportunity to get their daughters into USC without resorting to cheating the system, including an old-fashioned legal way to cheat the system. Prosecutors claim that by making a big donation to USC, their older daughter Isabella’s admissions package would have made its way to the top of the pile, thus increasing her chances of getting accepted.

But Lori and Mossimo allegedly did not do that. Instead, prosecutors argue, they deliberately chose to cheat their way in. And prosecutors claim they have emails between Lori and Mossimo in which the two turned down USC’s offer to help put Isabella’s admission package in the right hands.

Giannulli allegedly “rebuffed” a University of Southern California development official’s offer in 2016 to “flag” the college application of the couple’s older daughter, the feds said in court documents filed Tuesday.

“I think we are squared away,” Mossimo wrote in a Sept. 27, 2016 email to the official and then forwarded that email to his wife, writing: “The nicest I’ve been at blowing somebody off,” according to the court papers.

Prosecutors also claim they have emails between Mossimo and Rick Singer, in which they explicitly discuss the plot details on how they were going to fake Isabella’s rowing credentials.

Singer told the couple that he would “create a coxswain profile” for Isabella and “noted that ‘it would probably help to get a picture with her on an ERG in workout clothes like a real athlete too,” emails say, according to the court documents. Prosecutors note in the documents that Isabella Rose “did not row crew, and was not a coxswain.”

Yet, Giannulli, copying Loughlin replied, ‘Fantastic. Will get all,’ prosecutors say, adding that Mossimo later emailed Singer a snap of his daughter “posing on an ergometer.” Singer then sent “a falsified athletic profile that including this picture” to Donna Heinel, the former senior associate athletic director for USC, the court papers state.

The documents also state that once Isabella was accepted under the pretense of being a rowing team member, Mossimo was instructed to cut a check for $50,000 made payable to USC Athletics. Later in the documents, Lori and Mossimo are accused of wiring Rick Singer $200,000 after Isabella’s successful admission, and requested Rick get to work on Olivia’s admission scam that very day. Rick allegedly responded by asking Lori and Mossimo to get to work on the next chapter of their alleged college con job.

The documents detail how in July 2017, Singer emailed the couple “to request a photograph for their younger daughter’s fake athletic profile, writing, ‘[i]f we want USC I will need a transcript, test scores and picture on the ERG.’”

I know that Lori and Mossimo really wanted their daughters to go to USC, but this all seems like a lot of work. Especially when it sounds like USC sent them a link to the donation page of their website with a wink. Not to mention that a $500,000 donation might have resulted in their name on a building. At the very least, it would have gotten them a plaque on a bench. But they got greedy. And now, the best chance they’ve got of being recognized on campus is if someone vandalizes an ATM with the words: The Aunt Becky Center for Admissions.

Pic: Wenn.com