VARSITY BLUES AFFAIR WINDS DOWN AS EX-USC OFFICIAL NOW FREE
BY DANIEL LIBIT
July 12, 2023 12:00pm
Federal prosecutors described Donna Heinel as "one of the most prolific and culpable participants" in the college admissions scam. She was released last week after six months behind bars.
BY
EISEN/GETTY, PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY CORA VELTMAN
At her sentencing hearing in January, Donna Heinel
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stood before a judge at the federal courthouse in Boston, and pledged to spend the rest of her life trying to make amends for the disrepute she had brought to the university that was both her alma mater and longtime employer.
“I’ve lived through so many scandals at USC(https://www.sportico.com/t/usc/),” Heinel told the court, “and it just makes me sick that I am part of another scandal that might tarnish the incredible faculty and researchers they have.”
She is now free to make those amends.
According to Federal Bureau of Prisons records, Heinel was released from a low-security facility in California last week, following a six-month sentence.
While dozens prosecuted as part of Operation Varsity Blues have done jail time, the remaining list of defendants(https://www.justice.gov/usaoma/investigations-collegeadmissions-and-testing-briberyscheme)
still behind bars are down to Rick Singer—the college admission scheme’s ringleader, who was given a 3 1/2year sentence as part of a plea deal—and Gordon Ernst, the one-time men’s and women’s tennis coach at Georgetown. Ernst is set to be released in January.
Former USC water polo coach Jovan Vavic, who was found guilty by a jury last April of accepting over $220,000 in illegal bribes, had his conviction overturned by an appeal’s court last September. He is now awaiting a new trial.
In an interview with Sportico, Eric Rosen, the former Varsity Blues lead prosecutor, says that the incarcerations are the “last thing” he considers to be important.
“This wasn’t a case about who gets the longest sentence,” he said. “This was an impact case, designed to change a system that was corrupt and spiraling out of control, particularly among athletic admissions.”
Rosen, who is now in private practice, says the legacy of the Department of Justice’s largest prosecution of a college admissions scam can be seen in the reforms undertaken by universities across the country, as well as the national rethinking of how standardized testing plays into the admissions process.
As part her deal with the government, Heinel—one of the few people charged who did not eventually cooperate with prosecutors—pled guilty to one count of honest services wire fraud. Throughout her case and its disposition, Heinel maintained that she did not believe Singer’s payments to her constituted a bribe.
Neither Heinel nor her attorneys responded to recent email and text message queries, and a USC spokesperson declined to comment.
Federal prosecutors had initially sought a two-year prison sentence for Heinel, once the Trojans’ top female athletic administrator, describing her as “one of the most prolific and culpable participants in Singer’s athletic recruitment scheme.”
Between 2014 and March 2019, when she was arrested by FBI agents, Heinel directed approximately $1.23 million of Singer’s bribes to various USC athletic funds, according to prosecutors. Throughout that time, the government claimed, Heinel facilitated the admission of nearly two dozen USC applicants Singer sent her way by fallaciously presenting them to the university’s subcommittee on athletic admissions as legitimate college athlete prospects.
Those applicants included Olivia Jade, the social media influencer and daughter of actress Lori Loughlin and fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, who became the poster family of the scandal that rocked USC and other top institutions, such as Stanford, Yale, UCLA and Georgetown.
Prosecutors argued that Heinel was “significantly more culpable” than former UCLA soccer coach Jorge
Salcedo, who had already received an eight-month sentence, noting that Heinel had “facilitated the fraudulent recruitment” of eight times as many applicants to USC as Salcedo had to UCLA. Salcedo was released in late 2021, after striking a plea deal and admitting to receiving $200,000 in bribes from Singer.
Beginning in 2017, Heinel and Singer arranged that he would directly pay her $400,000, in $20,000 monthly installments, which Heinel billed as consulting services through her side company, Clear the Clearinghouse. Heinel has maintained that Singer was paying her the money as part of a legitimate deal to buy her consulting business, however she was unable to produce any substantive sale agreement.
The government, relying in part on Singer’s testimony, contended that the consulting monies were a sham and that Heinel was knowingly receiving them in exchange for her helping Singer further his “side-door” admissions scheme.
A court filing last month confirmed that Heinel had satisfied the monetary judgment of her sentence—the forfeiture of the $160,000 she was accused by the government of having received in Singer bribes at the time of her arrest. She was not ordered to pay any additional fine or restitution.
After USC fired her in March 2019, Heinel began working as a Lyft driver. Last June, she and her wife sold their four-bedroom home in the exclusive Naples Island enclave of Long Beach, Calif., for $2.2 million, according to records with the Los Angeles County Assessor’s Office—a million dollars more than they had paid for it in 2012. The following month, they bought a more modest home in the area for $1.25 million.
Rosen notes that, beyond their time behind bars, Heinel and her Varsity Blues cohorts have been dealt a number of collateral consequences.
“They were ridiculed, humiliated, stained and had major disruptions” to their careers, Rosen said.
Besides Heinel and Vavic, two other USC employees were charged with crimes related to the admissions scandal: former head women’s soccer coach Ali Khosroshahin, who forfeited around $208,000 and was sentenced to time served; assistant soccer coach Laura Janke, who was sentenced to time served.
Last April, USC published a page(https://change.usc.edu/usc-informationon-college-admissions-issue/)
on its website answering frequently asked questions about the Varsity Blues scandal.
“The small number of responsible individuals, all of
whom were in USC’s athletics department, have been disciplined and/or are no longer employed by the university,” the school said. “Under the leadership of our new athletics director Mike Bohn, behavior that is not consistent with our core values and ethics will simply not be tolerated.”
In May, however, Bohn resigned(https://www.latimes.com/sports/usc/story/202305-19/usc-athletic-director-mike-bohn-resigns)
from his position, a day after the Los Angeles Times asked him about the school hiring an outside law firm to investigate hostile workplace allegations made against him.
(https://www.sportico.com/leagues/collegesports/2024/ryan-