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A federal court in Boston sentenced Michelle Janavs — the so-called Hot Pockets heiress — to five months in prison for the college admissions scandal, according to The Associated Press. And the verdict may shed light into what will happen to Lori Loughlin.

What happened to Janavs?

  • Janavs, whose father and uncle invented Hock Pockets, was seen as “far and away the most culpable” of all those accused in the college admissions scandal, which included 50 parents, including celebrity moms Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, according to Vanity Fair.
  • Janavs reportedly acted similar to both Huffman and Loughlin. She paid the scandal’s mastermind, William “Rick” Singer, $100,000 to have someone correct her daughter’s college entrance exam answers. And she paid Singer $200,000 to have her daughter admitted to the University of Southern California as a fake athletic recruit — something similar to what Lori Loughlin is accused of doing.
  • Janavs will now serve five months.
  • U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton said in the ruling that the “vast majority of parents do not brazenly try to push their kids in the side door” of colleges when they’re doing admissions, according to The Associated Press.
  • Gorton said: “They don’t love their children any less than you do. They just play by the rules of common decency and fair play.”

What does this mean for Loughlin?

  • This doesn’t tell us anything specific about Loughlin but it does raise some interesting questions about what her sentence could be if she is convicted and found guilty.
  • Huffman, who pleaded guilty in the scandal, only received a 14-day sentence. Janavs, who reportedly followed the same patterns as Huffman and Loughlin, only receive a five-month sentence.
  • But Janavs’ lighter sentence comes after she pleaded guilty in the trial. Experts have told me that Loughlin made a mistake in not pleading guilty, which could lead to a longer sentence.

How long will Loughlin serve?

  • If Loughlin is convicted, brand and reputation management expert Eric Schiffer told me that she would serve a long sentence. “She’s not gonna get off light. She’s gonna be doing hard time.”
  • Hollywood crisis manager Howard Bragman told me something similar: Loughlin “is a different matter because here we are, the same time frame later, and Lori has not resolved her case. Lori played it badly, went to court with, you know, a Mercedes van full of attorneys, looking like she had a stylist dresser, was smiling and waving. It just didn’t feel appropriate and didn’t feel like that’s how it should have gone down. It’s going to make it that much harder for people to get a measure sympathy for her.”
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