Several months into a legal dispute over his notes, William “Rick” Singer, the man at the center of the college admissions scandal, has offered his explanation for a series of iPhone missives he wrote while cooperating with an investigation into the money-for-admissions scam he perpetrated for a decade.
As he tried in October 2018 to elicit incriminating statements from his former clients in recorded phone calls, Singer wrote in a note, intended for his lawyer, that the federal agents overseeing his cooperation wanted him to “bend the truth” and “ask questions and retrieve responses that are not accurate.”
Attorneys for 14 parents who have pleaded not guilty to conspiring with Singer to commit fraud, bribery and money laundering have seized on the notes, accusing government authorities of browbeating Singer into following their theory — that payments they made to get their children into elite universities were bribes to corrupt employees, not legitimate donations to university accounts.
At his handlers’ direction, Singer fabricated evidence he knew to be inaccurate, the attorneys alleged in asking U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton to dismiss the indictment. Currently, seven defendants — among them, Lori Loughlin, a television actress, and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, a fashion designer — are scheduled to begin trial Oct. 5 in Boston. Another seven are slated for trial in January.
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