A classmate of Lori Loughlin’s daughter said that she’s not surprised at the nationwide college bribery scandal because she thought it was suspicious that Olivia Jade Giannulli, 19, got into the University of Southern California.
According to federal agents, Loughlin and husband Mossimo Giannulli paid $500,000 to get Olivia Jade and Isabella, 20, designated as crew recruits despite neither girl participating in the sport.
The girls were accepted into USC through the program.
Harlow Brooks, a YouTube star like Olivia Jade, attended high school with her. Brooks said in a video posted in reaction to the news on March 13 that she moved to Los Angeles during her junior year and began attending “a super-elite private school in Los Angeles.”
“I remember when I toured this high school I saw a picture of Olivia Jade’s sister, actually, on the wall with the seniors and it was like, ‘Congratulations … Bella for getting into USC!’ And I was like, ‘Oh wow … USC is super hard to get into,’” she recalled.
“Then I remember hearing later that Olivia had also gotten into USC and I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s like kind of crazy because USC is very, extremely hard to get into,'” she added. “So not only one sister, but both of them. I was like, I mean I guess it’s because their mom is a celebrity, maybe she donates a lot of money, or paid someone to pretend like her daughter’s on the rowing team.”
Brooks said schools like the one she attended are “literally harder than college.” She said they cost $30,000 to $45,000 per year.
“It is insane what these students go through to go to these schools because their parents think that they need to. They want them to go to Yale and Harvard and USC … and if they can’t get in they have to buy their way in,” she said. The YouTuber said she woke up at 6 a.m. every morning to go to school, stayed there until 4 p.m., and did six hours of homework every night. [
She struggled to understand how Olivia Jade completed all the work and still had time for her YouTube career.
“How does she travel for YouTube? How does she have time to make YouTube videos? An arrangement with the school or something? It just didn’t make sense to me,” she said. “These schools, your life is literally 100 percent school.”
She criticized the girl for taking away a slot that could have gone to a true athlete.
“The fact that she took away an athletic scholarship from someone who deserved it, and didn’t have the money to pay for USC and had been training all their life to get on the rowing team—it’s just crazy,” she said.
Brooks’s video, titled “I went to school with Olivia Jade … the real problem,” has over 3 million views.
In a follow-up video posted on March 18, Brooks claimed that five classmates from the high school want to sue her now.
“They decided to start threatening to sue me. The first message about suing was saying like ‘I’m going to give you a few days to take this video down or I’m going to sue you for all your money,'” Brooks said.
Brooks said her mother assured her she had done nothing wrong.
