Melissa korn, shes a reporter for the wall street journal and previously she wrote for dow jones newswire. Shes a graduate of Cornell University and Columbia University graduate school of journalism. Also we have jennifer levitz, jennifer is National Reporter for the wall street journal and previously she wrote the Providence Journal and has been a member of two Pulitzer Prize finalist teamswhen she graduated from wyoming university maryland. In their review of unacceptable, curtis wrote the authors highly readable exposc goes well beyond tabloid level. A capable examination of the seamy intersection of ambition, money and Higher Education. And Library Journal calls it a fastpaced account of the massive College Admissions scam designed by rick singer read this indictment of contemporary American Culture offers an indepth look at families who are willing to break the law and ignore Ethical Principles to provide Higher Education for their children. A well researched detailed picture of crime emerging in an American Culture corrupted by wealthand celebrity. A pleasure to have them here to tonight to talk about the book with us and with that i will handle things off to emily. We are thrilled to be here talking with you tonight about this captivating book. Lets start with the scam. Melissa, why dont you start us off. How did what prosecutors call operation for varsity blues work . How did mastermind ricksinger think of it . It was a complex scheme and thats one reason it was just how many parts there were two it and how many people needed to be involved for it to be successful. Theres the testing part where rick singer paid off administrators and a test proctor and had his clients get their students tested for learning differences so they could get expanded time on their app or sat and once they got extended time they could register to take their test at these particular sites that a proctor would go after the team was done, fix the wrong answers and in some cases sit alongside the students and kind of repeat them the answers and in one case even take the test for a teenager who was sitting homesick in another state so that was the testing part. The other part was athletic recruiting and really kind of underminingthat system. Singer would pitch kids to teams as a star athlete, soccer players, rowers, tennis players and he would send out an athletic profile for them, kind of a onepage resume about all theaccolades and championships they back and pitch them to a school. Pay off the coach to have that team flagged as a root recruit and the kid would get into school because the recruiter athletes at such a benefit in the admissions progress. That is a scam. And jennifer, what drove singer with this . Was he trying to get rich . Was it Something Else . Rick singer was an extraordinarily competitive man to the point that everyone we spoke to from his childhood years, college, that was one of the first things they would say. This guy did not want to lose. If you pay play pickup basketball he was throwing elbows. If he coached the junior high kids he would try to run up the score by 50 points. He ran a call center and just got everyone to get on the phones more and turn the place around and there was something about him as one employee said, it was almost like his mindwas jolted like a gambler when he won. It seems that with the parents, he took it as a personal challenge. He had these parents often were almost just as competitive as him come to him and it was a puzzle. His family went to georgetown , the kid didnt quite cut it , with a need to take it upon themselves to do this and i dont think it was really about money. He did become very rich and we know he bought a big house and he had a nice car and things but he worked constantly and he just worked around the clock and didnt take vacations. His house didnt look like he lived in it that much. He didnt hobnob, he was invited to parties and paris and didnt go instead at night he be at the municipal schools tryingto get his name on the leaderboard. Thats competitive and what drives a parent to do this . I think its the culture and community in which these parents lived. Its this strange bubble that allows them to have a very warped view of the world and what success was so a lot of these parents had short list of what acceptable destination schools might be for their teenager. A lot of them were limited in that and it was almost a provincial view of Higher Education and the idea that these few schools are bought without understanding the nuance and how many other wonderful colleges were out there but these parents as jennifer said were quite competitive. They had targets, they wanted to meet their goals and they were also wanted someone to help make it happen or do it for them and singer often came highlyrecommended by friends, by Financial Advisors , by neighbors so that his name got passed around and for some of them they went to singer specifically for the Illicit Activity and for others they started on the legal side and then went over the line as they worked closer and closer tocollege. Jennifer, how did the parents come to cross the line . It very. Some of the parents hired singer for Legal College counseling and that went on for a good long time before they crossed the line. Other parents really came to him almost immediately for his dark arts. Some of these little niceties but they got quickly down to business. And its part of how he got them tocross the line. Am of the parents argued they were manipulated, misled. They were confused and we do know that there were conversations where he would talk to a parent and really just paint a grim picture of this kids chances and of course the parent is sitting there shocked because they had thought they would just keep moving in these very elite circles and he saying no, youre not getting in anywhere, youre not getting into schools and so they would come away convinced that there had to be something to make their child stand out. Thats what many of them have said and we also know that he was very emotionally intelligent and he was very good at figuring out what a parent was worried about. Maybe they were worried the kid was a poor testtaker and figuring out who might be amenable to crossing the line because remember he had many legal clients that he didnt cross the line with but on the other hand as the prosecution haspointed out this was a criminal conspiracy so you needed one person , rick singer to ride the coaches, set up the test site but then you needed a parent to write the check and do all sorts of other things ranging from flying the kid to a test site in houston or West Hollywood to opposing them on spat athletic equipment for sports they didnt play or making up cover stories for the school to writing a big check and these crimes often played out over months. It wasnt one day i just went into a store and, it was months so there were chances for people to back out along the way so its very interesting the decisions that people made and we tried to get and it really ranged and you could see people just wrestling with this but at some point at least the ones who pledguilty at some point got on board. Its amazing and melissa, as jennifers talking and thinking of a couple of scenes from your book that just really stuck out where you show parents sort of question it or questioning their judgment, when miss hoffman is driving her daughter, can you tell us how that played out through the West Hollywood site. Hoffman was working with singer for her younger daughter for College Counseling and the older daughter as jennifer described it solely slowly got more and more on board with this team and then the day comes when she has to drive her daughter to the test site to take the test and the daughter know that anything is amiss. Shes going to take her sat but felicity knows that this corrupt proctor is going to fix her answers afterwards so they drive down from their house in the Hollywood Hills and the daughter isnervous, shes taking her sat. He says maybe we can get ice cream after felicity agrees her mind is clearly elsewhere. She is thinking turn around, i need to turn around and she does it and she goes and her daughter takes the test and mike rendell fixes her answers and she gets a wonderful score and hoffman has spoken about how awful she felt in that moment. Her head is spinning just thinking she knows what shes doing iswrong, she just didnt stop, she kept on going. She goes to her younger daughter a year later and says were not going to do this and she and her husband bail on the scheme for the younger daughter week before their writing the case in and two weeks before they were arrested. And jennifer, tell us what that arrest moment was like for the family. How did that morning play out . It still amazes me to think of what happened and what i would do if this was me. Basically this had been in the works for weeks and had been kept very quiet and so the fbi, ill give you the example in los angeles as it was kind of the epicenter so the fbi there would have met in the dark very early in the morning in a startup parking lot and about 13 different teams of many agents and then they stand out and they went to the home, big home. Behind the gates and long driveways and they banged on the door. Fbi, they were on and people were inside and they were almost all asleep. I know one mom was in her pilates close and they were just up but mostly asleep and they were startled and they went to the door and theres a team of people andthen if they cooperated , they were allowed to kind of change into sweats or tees or something and they were, they brought them out and put them in the government sedans and took them to downtown la to the big Federal Building and they were really, this was a real exposure for them. There was nothing spare here, it was shackles, it was brought into this space with their photograph taken and fingerprinted and then they were put into big cells and they were, the men were put in one and the women were put in another and they were given some bologna sandwiches or something and they were all sitting there and in the mens cell curious things started to happen which was a couple people started to recognize one another. Like, they really knew a couple people and then there was a doctor in their and his scrubs so they had moved in similar circles some of them and we know that Felicity Huffman and jane buckingham, they are friends. Youre here to so in the mens cells there sitting there and some of them knew why they were there but some of them didnt and they didnt know what they all have in common. One of the coaches spoke up and says do you guys know rick singer . And the whole cell went quiet and everybody looked at one another and said oh my god. And thats when they realized what was going on. So the fbi didnt have to tell them when they showed up that morning. They told them what they are being charged with. There being charged with Honor Services fraud which is, people dont really know exactly what that means. So i think some of them probably knew remember, some of these people they had done business withrick singer. Thats an extraordinary scene. And melissa, what should readers think or maybe not what should what do you think readerswill think of the parents after reading your book . What should we make of them . I think its a range, one of the challenges in writing this book and getting to know some of them was that i could as parents relate to some aspect of who these people are area not in their actions but in their approaches and their intentions perhaps, wanting to do the best for their kids and maybe feeling insecure as a parent and having this person come and say i can fix it all for you and wanting to rely on the experts so much so i think it would be too easy to outright hate these parents and say they all did awful things yes , parents have pled guilty to felony criminal charges but they all got there from some different reasons. So i think i can kind of relate a little bit to them and maybe feelbad for some of them. Not too bad but you feel a little bad for some of them that clearly they got off track in their parenting and their understanding of what was success and you also end up getting a little angry at them that they did give their kids the space to figure themselves out. But they had this myopic view of success and what it should look like and they didnt bother with their kids to go down that path on their own. There were more overbearing than perhaps they should have been. They also just became so focused on success which is frustrating as somebody who knows that so many other schools out there that these teenagers would have been perfectly fine for them to say usc or boston or it must be georgetown. So its really just emotion but i think each parent and each family story and a like rick singer for various reasons. Fascinating and jennifer, what about the kids . Were any of them charged . What do they think about all this . The Us Attorneys Office in massachusetts when they announced the charges against the parents , they said that some of the kids new and some of them didnt and it was a possibility that the kids could get charged. That was march 2019 and none of the kids had beencharged and i personally dont think any of them will. And they said this that day, the parents were the primary drivers here. The parents set this up and the kids, most of them werein high school. It was hard on the kids area we got the first interview with one of the kids to talk about how he felt about it and it was pretty heartbreaking because he was a young man who was so talented already on his own. He was working so hard. He would go up the classes and he been on the college as a train and in ninth grade, practicing and so the also had a list of colleges that didnt even include usc. He had a range of schools. There were some state schools and smaller schools. He was interested in the environment but he felt betrayed when this happened. His father came home that day after being in the jail cell and they have to post bail and hewas in the kitchen and his father walks in and the first thing he said to his father was why didnt you believe inme . It sounds so heartbreaking. He talked about it from anger that he shifted to sort of feeling a little bad for his dad for not quite getting it and upsetting himself for not speaking up so there was that anger and that visceral reaction. And then when jennifer spoke to him months later he took a little more time to think about it, a little more perspective and a little bit more of like , thats sad that my dad thought he needed to do that. I think you grow up a lot from this incident. He said he realized that his parents, that a lot of parents in his committee had been trying to do the best in the kids lives and he had gone along and he was 20 now and he said he realized he wasnt going to do this anymore. He was going to make his own decisions and in fact he made the decision to speak he didnt consult with any lawyers or family representatives and i had to call to get a little bit of information about the kid and the lawyers were like he spoke to you and later i found out the father was thinking i cant believe he did this and this is a huge mistake but then when the story came out and his point of view was out there he was so thoughtful and well spoken , they all said we were wrong , that he could handlehimself and he almost spoke out to prove a point. You can trust me. Thats fascinating that he proves them wrong twice in a way. Where are the kids now . Its a range. A number of the universities went out so georgetown and yale and stanford, they were taking admission offers or someone who lives at northwestern, but one of the coaches womens volleyball coaches had been charged in pled not guilty, the school returned that the students didnt seem to know what was up when the parents took rick singer to allege, the kids didnt know what they could say and usc reviewed dozens of cases or cases of this, the parents were charged and also other kids who had carried out and were connected to all of this even if their parents didnt Face Criminal Charges and not everyone was kicked out at usc. This young man that jennifer and i had been talking about , he was still there and we spoke to him over the winter. Others just left voluntarily. Its been arrangement those who did stay at their schools , they really had to defend themselves and to say listen, i do belong here on my own merits. Amidst all this, tell us a little bit more how hard is it to get tocollege . I know they felt they needed to do this but today . It depends on what school they wanted to go to. For the vast majority of students that go to colleges that admit the vast majority of athletes so it does not hurt to get into college. It is very hard to get into certain schools and it has gotten a lot harder to get into some of those schools in the past five, 10, 15 years and application volumes have risen. People see that, they get nervous and they decide to apply the more schools and its a vicious cycle and when youre looking at schools that have rates in the 5 to 10 percentrange , high schools in the low teens with usc in their, it seems really daunting so you can kind of understand why some parents or some families think they need to boost their odds a little bit whether thats with an essay coach or having their kids go in onvolunteer trips. People are looking for a way to stand out and this is followed by applicants, these kids are taking it to quite another level but there is a palpable anxiety among parents of High School Students when they see their low admit rates and they hear the Horror Stories of someone with a 4. 5 rated gpa who didnt get in anywhere. Jennifer, whats different from the high schools that are sending the kids to these schools or the high schools where rick singer had clients. Is there any reform happening there . Yes, theres high schools were interesting in this book as they were on one hand a lot of these schools seemed to almost perpetuate this anxiety by promoting how many kids we got into these great schools, theyd have little maps on thei