Dozens of Rich and/or Famous People Have Been Charged in an Alleged College Admissions Bribery Scheme
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Fifty people, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, have been indicted in federal court over allegations that they paid large bribes to get their children into elite colleges, both ABC and NBC News are reporting. As everyone else on Earth will joke today: Whatever happened to just buying a wing of the arts building?
A recently unsealed complaint in the Massachusetts United States District Court published on Tuesday morning by NBC, centering on a former Yale soccer coach named Rudolph “Rudy” Meredith, who prosecutors allege worked with a college prep advisor named William Rick Singer, the owner of a business called Edge College & Career Network, shows how the scheme is supposed to have worked.
Prosecutors allege that in 2015, Meredith agreed to accept bribes from Singer and “others known and unknown” to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, in exchange for “designating applicants to Yale as recruits to the Yale women’s soccer team,” making it far easier for them to be accepted to the school.
The U.S. Attorney’s office alleges that Singer and Meredith did this kind of thing repeatedly, “retaining clients willing to pay bribes to university athletic coaches and administrators” in order to get their kids admission to “highly selective” colleges, each time designating those kids as recruits for an athletic team at the target school. They also allege that Singer funneled the payments through a “purported charity,” as they put it, called the Key Worldwide Foundation (KWF). According to their tax filings, KWF, a registered nonprofit, said the organization was created to help “underprivileged students” achieve their educational goals:
The Key Worldwide Foundation endeavors to provide education that would normally be unattainable to underprivileged students, not only attainable but realistic. With programs that are designed to assist young people in every day situations, and educational situations, we hope to open new avenues of educational access to students that would normally have no access to these programs. Our contributions to major athletic university programs, may help to provide placement to students that may not have access under normal channels.
In their 2016 tax forms, KWF reported assets of $2, 151,914 at the end of the year. Virtually all of the money coming into the organization came from contributions and grants, records show, $3.7 million worth that year alone.
Unlike a lot of charities, KWF’s substantial funds don’t seem to have flowed back out as easily as they flowed in: the same year, it paid out just $860,112 in grants and other assistance to domestic organizations, a fraction of what they were taking in. Documents also show they paid over $1 million in other expenses, which appears to be, in other words, substantially more than they were paying out in grants.
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