The corruption scandal in universities includes actors, coaches and CEOs



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Actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman have been charged with several current and former coaches, among others.

The FBI and Boston federal prosecutors have filed lawsuits against 50 people, including several sports coaches and university admissions examiners, as part of a national fraud and recruitment scheme. Admissions to universities, according to court documents published for the first time on Tuesday. 13 people were charged.

According to the indictment, the program was intended to help potential students cheat on entrance exams at the university or to pose as athletes recruited in order to cheat. be admitted to prestigious universities with bribes of up to $ 6 million. The project would have facilitated the admission of some students as athletes, regardless of their athletic abilities.

The parents would have paid a Californian a predetermined amount which he would then direct to a SAT or ACT administrator, or a university sports coach. The coaches would help non-rookies enter the school by saying that they were recruits. Most students would have admitted under these false pretenses that they did not know that their admission was conditional on a bribe.

The actors Felicity Huffman, from Desperate housewives glory and Full houseLori Loughlin was charged in this scheme, according to court documents, according to which the FBI recorded phone calls with the two actresses and a cooperating witness, during which they allegedly discussed the scheme. The two men were charged with conspiracy to commit postal fraud and honest service.

John Vandemoer, former Yale women's soccer coach, Rudy Meredith, former Georgetown tennis coach Gordie Ernst, several USC Olympic sports coaches, UCLA's current men's football coach, Jorge Salcedo, and the current Texas men's tennis coach, Michael Center, are among the defendants. Ernst, who is accused of taking several six-figure bribes to admit false recruits, resigned without explanation from Georgetown last summer. He is currently a coach in Rhode Island.

Wake Forest volleyball coach, William "Bill" Ferguson, has been indicted for racketeering conspiracy. Wake Forest announced Tuesday that the University had put Ferguson on "administrative leave" while they were investigating the charges against him.

Mark Riddell, director of exam preparation for college entrance to the IMG Academy, a preparatory school at the private university and sports academy in Bradenton, Fla., Was charged with conspiring in to commit a postal fraud and honest service, along with a charge of conspiracy to launder money.

In her affidavitSpecial Agent Laura Smith stated that the FBI had "probable reasons to believe that the accused had conspired with other known and unknown persons: in elite universities, to designate certain candidates as recruited athletes or candidates favored, thus facilitating the admission of candidates to these universities and (3) to use the facade of a charity to conceal the nature and source of the bribe payments.

The program, which would have been implemented from 2011 to the present, through court documents, involved the universities of Georgetown, Stanford, UCLA, San Diego, USC, Texas, Wake Forest and Yale.

One student was reported as a USC lacrosse rookie despite the lack of a lacrosse team in the Trojans' sports programs. Another potential student was "made a long snapper" despite weighing only 145 pounds. The sports history of other students has been similarly described for admission purposes.

According to the court documents, there is no indication that the schools were directly involved in wrongdoing.

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