Lori Loughlin hands herself in as Instagram 'influencer' daughter under pressure over university scam
The American star of 90210 was arrested on Wednesday on charges of bribing her children’s way into a California university, as calls mounted for her Instagram influencer daughter to lose her lucrative contracts.
Lori Loughlin, 54, was charged with fraud and brought before a judge in Los Angeles – one of 33 parents indicted in the $25 million (£19m) scam.
They are accused of paying William Singer to secure their children places at elite universities including Yale, Stanford and Georgetown.
Singer, who pleaded guilty on Tuesday to all charges, would then pay bribes to either the administrators of entrance exams in Houston or West Hollywood, or to athletic coaches, who would agree, for a fee, to let the children into their sporting squads.
Among the sporting coaches charged on Tuesday was Gordon Ernst, 52, a former tennis coach at Georgetown University who taught Michelle, Sasha and Malia Obama how to play.
Ernst allegedly accepted nearly $3 million in bribes and in return helped a dozen students get onto the Georgetown's tennis team, including children who did not play the sport competitively.
The children would feign an injury, said Andrew Lelling, US attorney for Massachusetts, or else just not show up for their sporting practices.
The entrance exams were “corrected” after the students had sat them by Singer’s co-conspiritor Mark Riddell, a 36-year-old Harvard graduate and former professional tennis player.
Some of the students were unaware that their parents had rigged the system.
Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, are both accused of turning to Singer to secure places for their daughters Isabella Rose and Olivia Jade at university.
For $500,000 the girls were designated as recruits for the University of Southern California rowing team - despite that fact that neither child participated in the sport.
Olivia Jade, a famous YouTube make up star, with two million followers, attends USC.
Last year she was forced to apologise for stating on the channel: “I don’t know how much of school I’m going to attend … I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”
And on Wednesday the advertisers on her YouTube channel and her Instagram supporters were facing calls to distance themselves from her.
The 19-year-old has had paid partnerships with Marc Jacobs Beauty, TRESemmé, Calvin Klein, Lulus, Amazon, SmileDirectClub, and WindsorStore.com, among others.
She has been working with Sephora for quite some time, specifically promoting the company's own Sephora Collection products on social media and, recently, collaborating on the Olivia Jade x Sephora Collection Bronze & Illuminate Palette.
Now social media users are asking Sephora to end their deal.
“Please do a video for how you prepared for the SATs,” reads one comment on her Instagram page.
“Are you allowed to drink alcohol? You might lose your athletes scholarship!! Be careful!!!” said another, on a photo that shows her posing behind a giant glass of wine.
In the wake of Tuesday’s scandal, Loughlin has deleted all of her social media accounts, but her daughter Olivia Jade’s are visible, including a tweet from 2017 that reads: “It’s so hard to try in school when you don’t care about anything you’re learning.”
Felicity Huffman, the Oscar-nominated actress who was arrested at dawn and granted $250,000 bail on Tuesday over the scandal, was also being mocked on Wednesday for her old tweets.
In a post sent in August 2016, Huffman wrote: "What are your best hacks for the back-to-school-season?"
