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By: BWST Staff
LOS ANGELES, CA – Actresses Lori Loughlin (Full House) and Felicity Huffman (Desperate Housewives) have been indicted on felony mail fraud charges after they allegedly paid to falsify their respective children’s SAT/ACT scores and athletic abilities in order to get them into Ive League schools.
According to federal reports, Loughlin paid in excess of $500,000 to get her two daughters into the University of Southern California.
It was an incredibly poor investment, considering that tuition for her two daughters combined over the course of four years would have cost roughly $400,000.
Huffman, who starred as Lynette Scavo, a working mother on ABC’s Desperate Housewives, reportedly paid $15,000 to have an outside organization help her daughter cheat to raise her SAT scores.
Loughlin and Huffman are just two of 33 affluent parents caught up in what has been described as “the nation’s largest-ever college admissions bribery case prosecuted by the Justice Department,” according to USA Today.
Many in the group are linked to William Rick Singer, a wealthy “entrepreneur” who wears sweater-vests with polo shirts and sports a bowl cut. Singer is the founder of an organization called “The Key”, which allegedly specializes in taking large sums of money from some of California’s wealthiest families with the promise of admission into prestigious universities.
Over the course of eight years, Singer is said to have collected in excess of $25 million from these families to help them cheat their child’s way into college; enough to pay the salary of 555 public school teachers or fund four full years of tuition to in-state schools for nearly 700 underprivileged students nationwide.
In America, the wealth gap between Black and white families is staggering. According to the New York Times, for every $100 in wealth held by a white family, a Black family has just $5.04. Likewise, a 2016 report revealed that the 100 richest Americans controlled more wealth than the entire Black population of the United States.
Without significant changes in policy which alter this reality and make it impossible for people like Lori and Felicity to continue stepping over working class people and people of color in this country, it will take nearly 225 years for this wealth gap to close.
In an interview with USA Today, FBI agent Joe Bonavolonta called the actions of Aunt Becky and others “insidious, selfish and shameful.”
“You can’t pay to play, you can’t lie and cheat to get ahead, because you will get caught,” he said.