In one infamous instance, a student was told to claim he was "slow" and needed extra time. He flew to a testing center where Riddell corrected his answers, boosting his score by over 300 points. The second, and perhaps most brazen, prong of the operation involved bribery in college athletics. Singer bribed coaches at elite universities to designate applicants as recruited athletes, even if the student had never played the sport competitively.
This is the story of how a con man, desperate parents, and compliant coaches shook the foundations of the American meritocracy. At the center of the tornado stood William "Rick" Singer. He was a college admissions consultant from Newport Beach, California, who had spent decades navigating the murky waters of elite university acceptance. Singer identified a crucial anxiety among the affluent: their children were good students, perhaps even great, but they weren't "guaranteed" material for the Ivy League or top-tier universities like Stanford, Yale, or USC. Varsity Blues
Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, took a different approach. They paid $500,000 to designate their two daughters as recruits to the USC crew team. Neither girl rowed. In an email presented in court, Loughlin wrote, "How do I proceed? ... I want to make sure we get this done right In one infamous instance, a student was told
