Mossimo Giannulli concocted a ruse at the University of Southern California long before the college admissions scandal, according to a 2016 interview he gave to The Hundreds fashion blog.
The fashion mogul, who’s been accused with wife Lori Loughlin of paying $500,000 so their daughters could be admitted to USC by posing as crew athletes, apparently once scammed his parents out of tuition money while pretending to be enrolled at the same school back in the 1980s.
He falsified report cards and tuition bills so his father would hand over the money, according to The Hundreds, and then used the capital to fund an early T-shirt venture.
“SC was expensive, so that was how I was starting my company,” Giannulli told the blog. “I used all that cash.”
Giannulli lived at a fraternity, The Hundreds wrote, and CNN noted that he took some classes in 1984 in a non-degree program open to anyone with no formal admissions requirements and was a non-matriculating student.
“I used to have hundreds of thousands of cash in my top drawer in my fraternity house,” he told The Hundreds. “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…’”
Even one of Giannulli’s daughters, social media influencer Olivia Jade, talked about his scheme in an interview before the college admissions scandal broke, the New York Post reported. She said her pop “was, like, never enrolled in college, he faked his way through it. ... Then he started his whole business with tuition money that his parents thought was going to college.”
Giannulli and Loughlin pleaded not guilty this week to charges stemming from the college admissions bribery investigation, which could potentially, though not likely, land them in prison for decades if they are convicted.