Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin & Bill McGlashan Hit With $500B Suit Over Elite Colleges Bribery Scheme
As the fallout from the nationwide elite college bribery scheme continues, the indicted Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin and STX Entertainment co-founder Bill McGlashan have all been hit today in a multi-billion dollar lawsuit from one very angry mother.
That’s “no less than $500,000,000,000” angry to be specific.
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“Joshua applied to some of the colleges where the cheating took place and did not get in,” says award winning former Oakland school teacher Jennifer Kay Toy of her 4.2 graduating son. “Joshua and I believed that he’d had a fair chance just like all other applicants but did not make the cut for some undisclosed reason,” Toy adds in the multi-claim fraud class action filed in a San Francisco court (read it here), with a hard tone that not even the filing can hide.
Filed yesterday, the class action doesn’t just go after the American Crime star, the Fuller House actor and the managing partner of TPG Growth but all the 30 other parents and more indicted and arrested this week in the “Operation Varsity Blues” bust. Like the other parents, Huffman, Loughlin, the Garage Sale Mysteries actor’s fashion designer husband Mossimo Giannulli and now ex-STX board member McGlashan are being charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services fraud, according to the unsealed indictment.
The Desperate Housewives and Fuller House actors were named among a well-heeled group who paid millions in bribes to to a William Singer-topped Key Worldwide Foundation fake non-profit and coaches at top schools like UCLA, USC, Yale Georgetown and Stanford, so their children could gain admission as recruited athletes – even if they weren’t actually athletes.
Posing as “donations” from the parents, the money allegedly funded illegal activity at the nonprofit included hiring other individuals to write admission exams for the potential students and bribing officials to alter SAT and ACT test scores. Revealing everything to prosecutors, Singer pleaded guilty on March 12 to racketeering and other charges in the RICO Act fueled investigation. A number of top college coaches also entered guilty pleas.
Huffman, Giannulli and McGlashan were among the LA-locals arrested and arraigned on March 12 too. Though he appears in the indictment, Huffman’s Shameless star husband William H. Macy was not named as a defendant in the matter.
Out of town filming a now-defunct Hallmark Channel project on the day of the initial arrests and court appearances, Loughlin was before a federal judge yesterday. Like her husband, the actor was granted $1 million bail bond and set to appear in a Boston federal court on March 29. As Macy looked on from the public gallery, Huffman was released on a $250,000 bail on March 12.
The other schools mentioned in the fed’s March 6 indictment are the University of San Diego, the University of Texas at Austin and Wake Forest University. In announcing the indictments, Andrew Lelling, U.S. District Attorney of Massachusetts, noted that, “The schools are not considered co-conspirators.” But some college coaches and one administrator — USC senior associate athletic director Dr. Donna Heinel — have been indicted.
“I’m now aware of the massive cheating scandal wherein wealthy people conspired with people in positions of power and authority at colleges in order to allow their children to gain access to the very colleges that Joshua was rejected from,” Toy says in language that is much kinder than many parents have been using since the the FBI and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts made the indictments of 33 parents, college coaches and administrators public on March 12.
“I’m not a wealthy person, but even if l were wealthy l would not have engaged in the heainous and dispicable [sic] actions of defendants,” the ex-public school teacher declares in the paperwork placed in the court docket by LA lawyer Daniel King. “I’m outraged and hurt because I feel that my son, my only child, was denied access to a college not because he failed to work and study hard enough but because wealthy individuals felt that it was ok to lie, cheat, steal and bribe their children’s way into a good college.”
Unlikely to be the last such lawsuit to be filed in the coming week and months out of this sprawling conspiracy, Jennifer Kay Toy’s action is in parallel with one kicked off by others.
Claiming the top college admission’s system is “warped and rigged by fraud,” a group of parents and students have launched a class action suit (read it here) against Singer himself, USC, UCLA and other schools named in “Operation Varsity Blues.” Stanford student Kalea Woods, community college student Tyler Bendis and his mother Julia, Erica Olsen, Rutgers student Nicholas James Johnson and his father James, Lauren Fidelak and her mother Keri want “compensatory damages in an amount which is fair and reasonable to compensate the Plaintiffs and the Class Members.”
Get ready for more – though probably not for a larger a sum.
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