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A California woman has been sentenced in the college admissions case on charges of paying more than $500,000 in bribes in the scandal, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts.
What’s going on:
- Elizabeth Henriquez, of Atherton, California, was sentenced to seven months in prison, two years of supervised release and ordered to pay a $200,000 fine.
- Henriquez must also complete 300 hours of community service.
- She must surrender herself to prison on June 30, 2020.
- Henriquez pleaded guilty on charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, and honest services mail and wire fraud, as well as one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
What happened:
- According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Henriquez worked with college scandal mastermind William “Rick” Singer and others to secure her child’s admission to multiple colleges across the United States. She had Singer have a proctor fix her two daughters’ SAT test answers.
- Henriquez also paid Singer $400,000 to make sure her daughter was admitted to Georgetown University as a tennis recruit, even though she had never played tennis in a competitive manner.
- The U.S. Attorney’s Office said: “Henriquez understood that the payment, structured as a donation to Singer’s purported charitable organization, would be passed on to the university’s tennis program in exchange for the complicit coach’s agreement to recruit her daughter based on fabricated tennis credentials.”
Why this matters for Lori Loughlin
- For one, Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton issued the sentence. He will be presiding over the college admissions scandal trial in fall 2020 when Lori Loughlin is expected to appear, as I wrote about for the Deseret News.
- The case is relatively similar to Loughlin’s case. Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, paid $500,000 in bribes so that their daughters, Olivia Jade and Isabella Rose Giannulli, would be team crew recruits for the University of Southern California — even though they had never competed in the sport before. The couple pleaded not guilty to the charges.