Lori Loughlin’s husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, was officially sentenced to five months in prison on Friday under the couple’s plea agreements on conspiracy fees in the country’s university admission scandal.
Giannulli’s conviction was first held at an online hearing in a boston federal court, conducted through Zoom through U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton.
Loughlin, 56, will be officially sentenced in the afternoon. Your petition calls for two months in prison.
The celebrity couple pleaded guilty in May to a conspiracy charge to devote electronic fraud and postal fraud under separate guilty plea agreements with federal prosecutors.
On Monday, prosecutors in charge of the case suggested that sentencing be handed down to settle the plea agreements. In one court case, prosecutors argued that the sentences were comparable to the sentences imposed on other prominent parents qualified in the case, taking into account the “repeated and planned behavior” of Loughlin and Giannulli and their “decision to allow their children to be complicit in a crime.”
Prosecutors described Giannulli as “the top active player in the show,” while Loughlin “had played a less active but yet utterly complicit role.”
The former “Full House” star and her husband, whose popular fashion line at Target, were among the dozens of wealthy and influential parents accused last year by the federal prosecutor’s office of lying and cheating to have their children. elite universities.
Loughlin and Giannulli were accused of paying $500,000 in bribes to the brains of a national admissions program, Rick Singer, so that their two daughters, Olivia Jade Giannulli and Isabella Giannulli, would be accepted at the University of Southern California as team recruits.
The couple have maintained their innocence since they were arrested in March 2019. For more than a year, his lawyers organized a defense calling for the case to be dismissed, arguing that Loughlin and Giannulli believed they were making “legitimate donations” to USC, not bribes. school officials.
They remained in that position until May, when they agreed to plead guilty after prosecutors withdrew corruption and money laundering fees, which may have resulted in longer criminal sentences.
By contrast, “Desperate Housewives” star Felicity Huffman accepted a price cut a few months after her arrest and was sentenced to 14 days in prison, a $30,000 fine, one year of supervised release and 250 hours of network service for paying $15,000. someone answers the SAT test of one of their two daughters.
She began serving her sentence in a California federal criminal in September 2019 and was released after 11 days.
Like other parents indicted in the “Varsity Blues” case, Loughlin and Giannulli have been accused of channeling cash into a fictional charity career through Singer.
Singer, who also pleaded guilty, began cooperating with investigators in September 2018 and secretly recorded his phone calls with his parents to identify the case that opposed them.
Giannulli “became more involved with Singer, directed the bribery bills to USC and Singer, and personally confronted his daughter’s principal school counselor to prevent the plan from being discovered, brabably a lie about his daughter’s athletic abilities,” prosecutors told the judge.
In this case, Giannulli faced the counselor angrily after the counselor began to wonder about the girls’ involvement in the crew, prosecutors said. Giannulli asked the counselor what he was telling USC about his daughters and asked the counselor why he was “trying to ruin or obstruct his opportunities,” the counselor wrote in detailed notes in court documents.
After the couple controlled bribing their youngest daughter to join USC, Singer sent them an email saying they had been allowed in because of their “potential to make a contribution to the inter-university sports program,” the prosecutors wrote.
Loughlin replied: “This is glorious news! (Emoji crashes all five)”, according to court documents.
Contribute: The Associated Press