The charges were unsealed by prosecutors in Massachusetts, California, Texas, Florida and North Carolina. Prosecutors said 38 people were in custody, including celebrities Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, who allegedly paid bribes to win admission for their children. Also accused is lawyer Gordon Caplan, co-chairman of the Willkie Farr & Gallagher law firm in New York. A call to the firm wasn’t immediately returned.
Prosecutors accused the former women’s soccer coach at Yale, the senior associate athletic director at the University of Southern California, the women’s volleyball coach at Wake Forest University and the sailing coach at Stanford. A college prep school director is charged, as is the director of an exam-preparation company.
Two defendants are scheduled to plead guilty in Boston on Tuesday, including Stanford’s sailing coach, John Vandemoer, and William Rick Singer, who ran a college admissions counseling company.
The U.S. dubbed the investigation "Operation Varsity Blues," a reference to a movie about a football team in Texas.
The scheme is alleged to have multiple elements.
According to prosecutors, college entrance-exam administrators took bribes to help applicants cheat on admissions tests by allowing others to pose as test-takers or giving students the answers. In other instances, university coaches and administrators were bribed to designate applicants as athletic recruits “regardless of their athletic abilities” -- or even, prosecutors said, when they didn’t play the sport at all.
The result was fraudulently obtained exam scores and inflated grades.
The defendants disguised “the nature and source of the bribe payments by funneling the money through the accounts of a purported charity, from which many of the bribes were then paid,” prosecutors said.
Yale, Stanford
Representatives from Yale, Stanford, USC, Georgetown and UCLA didn’t immediately return calls or emails seeking comment. Wake Forest and the University of Texas announced Tuesday that it had suspended coaches.