Prosecutors Push for Prison Time for Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli

Will the college admissions scandal's highest profile couple finally see prison time?

lori loughlin and mossimo giannulli
The couple is due to be sentenced Friday.
essica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Lori Loughlin and her husband Mossimo Giannulli are due to be sentenced on Friday for their involvement with the college admissions scandal, and prosecutors are pushing for prison time.

On Monday, federal prosecutors argued the couple deserve prison time for hiring consultant William “Rick” Singer and paying $500,000 to get their daughters admitted to the University of Southern California as fake crew recruits. In a sentencing memo, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reportedly urged the judge to uphold the terms of a plea agreement signed in May that would see Giannulli sentenced to five months and Loughlin to two months, according to Variety.

“The crime Giannulli and Loughlin committed was serious,” the prosecutors argued, maintaining that the prison sentences would be consistent with those handed down to other defendants in the massive college admissions case. “Over the course of two years, they engaged twice in Singer’s fraudulent scheme. They involved both their daughters in the fraud, directing them to pose in staged photographs for use in fake athletic profiles and instructing one daughter how to conceal the scheme from her high school counselor.”

Prosecutors also maintain that Giannulli deserves a longer sentence than Loughlin, arguing that he was the more active participant in the scheme.

“Loughlin took a less active role, but was nonetheless fully complicit, eagerly enlisting Singer a second time for her younger daughter, and coaching her daughter not to ‘say too much’ to her high school’s legitimate college counselor, lest he catch on to their fraud,” according to prosecutors.

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