Getting His Kids into College Wasn't Mossimo Giannulli's First USC Scam
When Mossimo Giannulli and his actress wife Lori Loughlin paid $500,00 for their daughters to be accepted to USC as crew team recruits, it wasn’t the first time the words “scam” and “USC” had merged for the designer.
Giannulli’s eldest, 19-year-old influencer Olivia Jade, had previously revealed during an interview on the Zach Sang Show that her father had “faked” his way through college. “He, like, built his whole entire brand and he wasn’t actually, like, I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, ever enrolled in college. But he, like, faked his way through it and then he started his whole business with tuition money that his parents thought was going to college. That’s, like, such a different time. I don’t know if I was supposed to say that, but it’s OK,” she explained.
Olivia’s explanation is a simplistic one. In reality, Giannulli, who, according to Jade “didn’t come from a lot,” falsified report cards and tuition bills and pocketed the cash his father intended to put toward his education, all in the name of earning funding for his company.
“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 told blogger Bobby Hundreds in 2016.
John Shearer/Getty Images
Giannulli was never a fully matriculated student, but did attend USC in some capacity during the spring semester of 1984. “He was enrolled in the College of Continuing Education, a non-degree program open to anyone ‘with no formal admission requirements,’” CNN reports. But despite his “visitor status” at the university, Giannulli got involved in Greek life with the Beta Theta Pi Fraternity. He’s sitting third from the left in the front row of the fraternity’s ’84 yearbook photo (page 374).
“Having non-matriculating students associate with the fraternity would not have been uncommon," a spokesperson for the fraternity told CNN.
As the news outlet pointed out, in the Beta Theta Pi yearbook photo, the family’s lawyer, Perry Viscounty, is sitting two rows behind Mossimo. So when you’ve done your last keg stand and are facing up to 40 years in prison, turn to your frat bros, I guess?