It wasn’t as though USC needed to further add to the unofficial true meaning (University of Spoiled Children) behind the school’s acronym, but this, naturally, is one of the primary schools at the forefront of what is being described as the “largest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice.”
With a list of parents’ names spanning the business and entertainment industries, among some of the most recognizable were Felicity Huffman (though it remains unclear why her husband–equally renowned for being “down to earth”–William H. Macy hasn’t been charged), Lori Loughlin (such un-Becky like behavior indeed!) and her husband, “designer” Mossimo Giannulli, the generically named Key Worldwide Foundation, operated by William Rick Singer (one of the few “famous” residents Sacramento can now claim), was basically a tax shelter for the con man to take bribes from affluent parents that could then be filtered to SAT/ACT testing centers and college athletic coaches. For instance, Loughlin’s daughters, Isabella Rose and Olivia Jade (because it’s a requirement for rich bitches to have names like these) were “designated as recruits to the USC crew team—despite the fact that they did not participate in crew—thereby facilitating their admission to USC” all for the cool price tag of $500,000. Or, more than some people will ever make in their working lifetime.
With a mid-range clothing company to match the mid-range acting abilities of his wife, those (ahem, Michael Ian Black) making quips about “how the fuck does Lori Loughlin have enough money to bribe USC?” need look only to the financial success of a brand that Midwesterners and other people not able to make the appropriate “true Italian” spelling distinction between Mossimo and Massimo (or even Mossimo and Moschino) are all too happy to purchase in the spirit of “sophistication.” As for the other primary names that stand out among Operation Varsity Blues (oh, if only James Van Der Beek had an age-appropriate child so as to be ironically implicated as well–though none of his five, five, kids are), Huffman and Macy paid $15,000 for their oldest daughter to take her SAT test in one of Singer’s “controlled” centers where the answers could be corrected before being sent off.
So when we wonder how someone as blatantly daft and uneducated as George W. Bush (Yale) and Donald Trump (The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania) could have ever transcended to the rank of president, we need only look to the age-old criticism (proven constantly correct) lobbied against the rich about buying their way to every opportunity in turn stolen from someone more qualified but somehow less viable because of their socioeconomic misfortune of birth. In this sense, it’s almost as though the wealthy have essentially been the class entirely responsible for breeding a nation of ever-increasing mongoloids precisely because they’ve boxed everyone else actually working at getting ahead out of the competition. And in this sense, the progenitors of this unending strain of spawn have effectively rendered their progeny too goddamn lazy to bother with much of anything at all other than serving as a hollow representation of a family name.
So it goes. Another day, another ultimately light slap on the wrist for the rich–the slight bruise of which money can cover with a tennis bracelet. In any case, you’ll never be able to watch Full House the same way again (especially that now endlessly hypocritical preschool scam episode). Desperate Housewives, on the other hand, looks more on point than ever. And, speaking of pop cultural references, even the kids in The Perfect Score (a movie Scarlett Johansson probably wishes she could wipe her resume clean of) worked harder to get into college than these sheltered from reality, delusional for thinking they got in on their own merit spawn.
