William “Rick” Singer, the mastermind behind the Varsity Blues college admissions cheating scandal, is out of prison and setting up a new college counseling company that he says will be legitimate, the Wall Street Journal reports. Singer, who served 16 months in a federal prison camp for a scheme that sneaked children of business moguls and Hollywood celebrities into elite schools, has been finishing his term at a halfway house in California. “I am not living in the gray anymore. The gray is over. I was the all-time Mr. Gray,” said Singer, 64. "Now, I’ve made a concerted effort to live in black and white.” The Varsity Blues scandal erupted in 2019, showing how easily the college-admissions process could be corrupted.
Singer pleaded guilty to four felonies. He paid college coaches or their programs to tag teens as recruited athletes—even if they didn’t play the sport—virtually guaranteeing their admission to top schools. Parents often funneled payments through Singer’s sham charity, enabling them to take tax write-offs. The conspiracy, which prosecutors said netted $25 million, led to guilty pleas or convictions of more than 50 people, including college coaches and actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. Singer attributed his trajectory in part to his own hypercompetitiveness. “I think everybody’s issues, and definitely mine, all come back to our egos. And as things start to roll and you start being more successful,” he said, “your ego grows—your desire grows.” Singer contends he was merely working within a system that was already broken and full of willing partners. He is most ashamed of the test-cheating component of his scheme, in which he paid administrators at two testing sites to turn a blind eye as his hired savant helped students through the ACT or SAT, or just answer the questions himself and hit the exact score they needed. He says, “Ethically, that was a hundred percent wrong.”
Comments