Actress Lori Loughlin and her fashion-designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli, were indicted this week on an additional federal charge of conspiring to bribe employees of USC to have their two daughters admitted to the university as part of the wide-ranging college-admissions cheating scandal.
Also, Donna Heinel, a former USC senior associate athletic director, and former UCLA men’s soccer coach, Jorge Salcedo, each face a new charge of conspiring to commit federal programs bribery by soliciting and accepting bribes to facilitate the admission of students to the universities where they worked. The defendants were previously charged with racketeering conspiracy in connection with the scheme.
In exchange for bribes, university employees implicated in the nationwide probe allegedly designated defendants’ children as athletic recruits—with little or no regard for their athletic abilities—or as members of other favored admissions categories, federal prosecutors said.
Arraignment dates for the four defendants have not yet been scheduled at press time.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, where the case is being handled, the charge against Loughlin and Giannulli carries a possible sentence of up to five years in prison, along with supervised release and fines of around $250,000.
A total of 52 defendants have been charged with conspiring with William “Rick’’ Singer of Newport Beach and others to bribe SAT and ACT exam administrators to allow a test taker to secretly take college entrance exams in place of their children, or to correct the children’s answers after they had taken the exams.
The defendants were also previously charged with conspiring to launder the bribes and other payments in furtherance of the fraud by funneling them through Singer’s purported charity and his for-profit corporation, as well as by transferring money into the United States, from outside of the county, for the purpose of promoting the fraud scheme.
