BOSTON — A former Newport Beach college admissions consultant who orchestrated a $25 million nationwide bribery scheme to get children of wealthy parents into USC, UCLA, and other top colleges was sentenced today, January 4, to three-and-a-half years in prison.
William "Rick'' Singer, 62, admitted to being the mastermind of the "Varsity Blues'' scandal that ensnared coaches, business executives, and Hollywood celebrities.
Singer was also sentenced to three years of supervised release following his prison term. Judge Rya Zobel also ordered Singer to pay $10 million in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service.
Singer pleaded guilty in March 2019 to charges of conspiracy to commit racketeering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
As part of the scheme, dubbed "Operation Varsity Blues'' by federal prosecutors, Singer had dozens of parents make "donations'' totaling about $25 million to his sham charity, Key Worldwide Foundation, to pay for the fraud.
Parents were able to deduct the payments from their income taxes, thereby
defrauding the IRS, prosecutors said.
Parents, coaches, business executives, and two Hollywood celebrities
were among 57 defendants implicated in the cheating scandal, in which parents paid Singer to have their children's entrance exam scores doctored.
In other cases, students were falsely admitted to elite universities as athletic
recruits, even though they never had any experience in the sports for which
they were being recruited.
The scandal led to prison time for Oscar-nominated actress Felicity
Huffman and "Full House'' actress Lori Loughlin.
One of the convicted parents was Elisabeth Kimmel, the former owner of the television station, KFMB. Kimmel and her husband still own an $8 million mansion in La Jolla, according to property records.
Kimmel pleaded guilty to paying more than $500,000 to get her daughter admitted to Georgetown University and her son admitted to the University of Southern California.
The judge sentenced Kimmel to six weeks in prison and one year of home confinement.
She was released in February of 2021 to serve her home confinement in an 8,000-square-foot penthouse in Las Vegas, where she currently lives, according to court records.
Two months after her release, Kimmel filed a motion with the court asking for permission to travel to Illinois.
"Mrs. Kimmel’s proposed travel is for two separate “once in a lifetime,” events, her daughter’s graduation from law school and her commissioning in the United States Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps," Kimmel's lawyers wrote in the motion.
Prosecutors filed an opposition, writing, "it would be a perverse result to allow the defendant to be released from custody to attend and celebrate the higher-education accomplishments of her children, even though her fraud, bribery, and lies relating to her children's college admission are why she is serving a federal sentence as a convicted criminal in the first place."
The judge denied Kimmel's motion.
In a written statement to the court in advance of his sentencing, Rick Singer apologized "for the pain that I caused the students and their families, and the universities and testing agencies.''
He wrote that he "can only hope that, once I have served whatever sentence the court determines is appropriate, the terms of my supervised release will allow me to work/volunteer in service to others and particularly to underserved youth.''
Singer's sentence is the longest handed down in the case. Singer, a Santa Monica native, lost his Newport Beach mansion as a result of the case and currently lives in a St. Petersburg, Florida, trailer park, his lawyer wrote in a sentencing memorandum.