Fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, the husband of Lori Loughlin, lied about attending the University of Southern California.
Giannulli and Loughlin are facing up to 40 years in prison in the nationwide college admissions scandal after prosecutors said they paid $500,000 to get their two daughters into the school, known as USC.
In an interview with The Hundreds blog in 2016, Giannulli said that he went to USC without being enrolled at all.
“He not only convinced his dad that he was a student by falsifying report cards, Mossimo got him to fork over fees with fake tuition bills. In fact, Moss used this seed money to initiate his foray into the T-shirt biz,” the blog stated, noting it was the 1980s.
“SC was expensive, so that was how I was starting my company. I used all that cash,” it quoted Giannulli as saying. “I used to have hundreds of thousands of cash in my top drawer in my fraternity house. And I was like, ‘This is kind of too easy. I need a bigger platform. If I had a bigger account base, I could really kill it.”
Giannulli, whose net worth is estimated in the hundreds of millions, got started at that time with his first clothing company.
While Giannulli said that he wasn’t enrolled at all, USC told CNN that records indicate he was enrolled but in the College of Continuing Education, a nondegree program open to anyone “with no formal admission requirements.”
Despite his status, he was part of the Beta Theta Pi Fraternity. A spokesman said that at the time, “having non-matriculating students associate with the fraternity would not have been uncommon.”
Olivia Jade Giannulli, 19, the younger daughter of Loughlin and Giannulli, previously said that her dad had a “crazy” time in college.
“I don’t know if I am supposed to say this, sorry dad. But [he] was like never enrolled in college, he faked his way through it,” she said during an interview on “The Zach Sang Show” on March 8, just four days before her parents were charged. “Yeah, so then he started his whole business with tuition money that his parents thought was going to college.”
Later in the interview, the teen YouTube star and social media influencer said that she planned on spending most of her time in school enhancing her brand.
“Mostly my parents really wanted me to go because both of them didn’t go to college… I think they did fine. Hypocrites,” she said. “But I am so happy they made me go. That sounds so terrible, they didn’t make me.”
