Desperate Housewives actress Felicity Huffman was arrested Tuesday morning over a mail fraud charge related to a college admissions scam that involves 33 elite CEO and celebrity parents paying their children’s way into colleges across the country.
According to Variety, another Hollywood star implicated in the scam, Full House actress Lori Loughlin, has not yet been arrested and is negotiating terms of her surrender.
Lori Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, are “accused of paying $500,000 to have their two daughters accepted to USC as members of the crew team, though they did not participate in crew,” the Variety report also states.
Yet the actress uses her social media to promote the virtue of “doing the right thing,” regardless of money.
Meanwhile, Huffman allegedly paid $15,000 to rig an SAT test for her daughter.
At least nine athletic coaches and 33 parents, many of them prominent in law, finance or business, were among those charged in the investigation. Dozens, including Huffman, were arrested by midday.
The coaches worked at such schools as Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, Wake Forest, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles. A former Yale soccer coach pleaded guilty and helped build the case against others.
Prosecutors said parents paid an admissions consultant from 2011 through last month to bribe coaches and administrators to label their children recruited athletes to boost their chances of getting into college. The consultant also hired ringers to take college entrance exams, and paid off insiders at testing centers to alter students’ scores.
Parents spent anywhere from $200,000 to $6.5 million to guarantee their children’s admission, officials said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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