Three Hollywood stars have been implicated in a massive cheating scandal.
Full House star Lori Loughlin and Oscar nominee Felicity Huffman are two of the 50 parents charged in a plot to get their children into schools including Georgetown, Stanford, UCLA, University of San Diego, USC, University of Texas, Wake Forest, and Yale.
The scheme was uncovered by the FBI and federal prosecutors in Boston, and involved parents paying bribes of up to $6 million to get their children into these elite schools.
In many instances, the children were unaware that their parents had paid these bribes according to federal documents.
Huffman has two daughters with husband William H. Macy including Sofia, who is 18, and 16-year old Georgia.
Loughlin and her designer husband Mossimo Giannulli also have two daughters: Olivia, 19, and Isabella, 20.
Macy was not charged but Giannulli was named alongside his wife in the papers.
Huffman, Loughlin and Giannulli are all charged with Conspiracy to Commit Mail Fraud.
Big house: Full House star Lori Loughlin and Oscar nominee Felicity Huffman are two of the 50 parents charged in a plot to get their children into elite schools (Loughlin with daughters Olivia and Bella in February)
Desperate housewife: Huffman paid a $15,000 ‘charitable contribution ‘to participate in the college entrance exam cheating scheme on behalf of her eldest daughter’ (Huffman and Macy with their daughters Georgia and Sofia at the Golden Globes)
‘Beginning in or about 2011, and continuing through the present, the defendants — principally individuals whose high-school age children were applying to college — conspired with others to use bribery and other forms of fraud to facilitate their children’s admission to colleges and universities in the District of Massachusetts and elsewhere, including Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California, and the University of Southern California — Los Angeles,’ stated the 200 page document that was filed on Tuesday.
Loughlin and Giannulli ‘agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team – despite the fact that they did not participate in crew – thereby facilitating their admission to USC,’ according to the documents.
Huffman paid a $15,000 ‘charitable contribution ‘to participate in the college entrance exam cheating scheme on behalf of her eldest daughter,’ states the complaint.
‘Huffman later made arrangements to pursue the scheme a second time, for her younger daughter, before deciding not to do so,’ according to the documents.
The charging docuemts state that Huffman had the site where he daughter took the SATs moved from her own high school to a test center West Hollywood.
The ‘cheating’ referenced in the documents occurred in five forms.
‘Bribing college entrance exam administrators to allow a third party to facilitate cheating on college entrance exams, in some cases by posing as actual students,’ is the first.
‘Bribing university athletic coaches and administrators to designate applicants as purported athletic recruits – regardless of their athletic abilities, and in some cases, even though they did not play the sport,’ is the second.
That is what the documents accuse Loughlin and her husband of doing with their daughters.
‘Having a third party take classes in place of the actual students, with the understanding that the grades earned in those classes would be submitted as part of the students’ application,’ is the third.
The fourth was ‘submitting falsified applications for admission to universities … that, among other things, included the fraudulently obtained exam scores and class grades, and often listed fake awards and athletic activities.’
And the fifth and final example was ‘disguising the nature and source of the bribe payments by funneling the money through the accounts of a purported charity.’
That is what Huffman is accused of doing in the documents filed on Tuesday.