College admissions scandal: Rick Singer sits down for first interview: ‘I did it’

EXCLUSIVE — “Everything the FBI and the U.S. Attorney and everyone else in the world says I did? i did it,” Rick Singer, 64, told Fox News in his first interview about his sensational college admissions scandal “Varsity Blues.”

Not long ago, Singer was one of the most talked about and controversial men in the country. Today, he lives quietly in a halfway house in Los Angeles, where he hopes to finish the remainder of his 42-month sentence after pleading guilty in 2019 to racketeering, money laundering and obstruction charges.

Singer says he can leave the halfway house most days to work with a restaurant group.

“I’m the guy that hides in plain sight. Nobody even knows who I am,” Singer told Fox in an exclusive interview in Los Angeles. “Now, someone can recognize me and I can hear people talking. But no one cares.”

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Monitors show Fox News’ Matt Finn conducting the first interview with Rick Singer, who pleaded guilty in 2019 to racketeering, money laundering and obstruction charges in the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal. (Fox News)

Singer’s charity, the Key Worldwide Foundation, billed as a way to help underprivileged children, poured in at least $25 million in what Singer calls “donations” from celebrities such as actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, with the hope that Singer would work his magic to make it happen. their children to elite schools.

Huffman pleaded guilty to his role in the crimes and served eleven days of a two-week sentence in a federal prison in California. Loughlin pleaded guilty and also served two months in a federal prison in California.

Federal prosecutors say the donations were bribes and conducted an extensive undercover investigation called “Varsity Blues” to destroy Singer and his accomplices.

According to an investigation by Fox News, at least 50 people had pleaded guilty or been convicted in the college admissions scandal by October 2023.

“I want to apologize profusely to all the families I’ve hurt, all the kids I’ve hurt. The administrators I’ve hurt. My own family,” Singer said in an exclusive interview in Los Angeles.

Singer’s elaborate scheme centered around creating falsified college student applications and embellishing them with fake test scores, sports experience and doctored photos. Singer recruited a network of college coaches and administrators to help him perfect the fake applications, and they accepted Singer’s money in what he referred to as “side door” deals.

When Singer’s plan first became known, the country erupted. Parents and critics alleged that Singer robbed countless students of their guaranteed, well-deserved spots at some of America’s top colleges and universities, including Georgetown, the University of Southern California and the Yale University.

Matt Finn conducts the first interview with Rick Singer, who pleaded guilty in 2019 to racketeering, money laundering and obstruction charges in the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal. (Fox News)

The Singer scandal became a monster media sensation, sparking months of news coverage, books, TV specials, and a Netflix documentary featuring actual taped conversations between Singer and his clients.

Despite the rejection and outrage, Singer, now a convicted felon, insists he never took a place from a deserving student. Instead, he says, his scheme exposed a budget tactic that institutions of higher education depend on: locking up certain “spots” on athletic teams and within departments from everyday applicants and reserving them for willing big donors to pay the entrance of a student.

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“90 percent of the time, coaches call me every year saying, ‘I have a spot open.’ I need to raise this amount of money… Find me a family,” Singer said.

When asked specifically how he did the most damage, he said he was ruining people’s names.

“The biggest thing is the reputation … that they worked so hard to create and build and be great people,” Singer said.

Singer admits to his crimes, admitting that he considers cheating the most brazen part. But he says college admissions offices haven’t faced the same intense scrutiny.

“The media missed that colleges, they’re my partner in this. It takes two parties to play,” Singer said.

Fox News reached out to the three schools Singer alleges he collaborated with the most: the University of Southern California, Georgetown and Yale. Yale has so far responded and declined to comment.

Matt Finn interviews Rick Singer, who pleaded guilty in 2019 to racketeering, money laundering and obstruction charges in the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal. (Fox News)

The singer, frontman, founder of the Edge College & Career Network leaves federal court in Boston on March 12, 2019, after pleading guilty to charges in a nationwide college admissions bribery scandal. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

Singer told Fox that he believes he took advantage of one of the three ways a student can get into college.

They can enter through the “front door” with legitimate merit and qualifications, through the “back door” when a family publicly donates massive amounts of money to a college or campus, or through a “side door.”

Singer says he mastered the backdoor method by crafting fraudulent student applications and paying people from inside a university.

“This has been going on for hundreds of years. I’m not that smart to invent this process,” Singer said.

The former basketball coach says he believes his side-door deals were targeted because they were made in private, but questions why major back-door donations that are often given in public with the expectation of favors.

Singer told Fox that his plan started in part with a student in Vancouver. Singer describes the student as intelligent but a poor test taker. So Singer enlisted the help of Mark Riddell, who Singer says he now feels bad about, by talking him out of $10,000 to falsify the Vancouver student’s final test score. Ridell became a key player in Singer’s scheme and was also convicted.

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“What I can tell you absolutely, what I did that was illegal, was cheat on the tests,” Singer said.

Singer didn’t reveal exactly how the first test was fooled, but said it involved false identification and described that first execution as a satisfying, movie-like heist that paved the way for his future careers.

Singer, who considers himself a lifelong “coach,” says that aside from his side-door deals, he also always ran a legitimate college coaching business that he claims has helped hundreds of students to enter university Singer says business moguls and Hollywood celebrities have used her legitimate college counseling for their children.

Before his time at the halfway house, Singer says he spent 16 months in a federal prison camp in Pensacola. Singer says he’s made friends while incarcerated, many of whom he says were locked up for fraudulent COVID-era PPE crimes. Singer claims that he hardly ever ate a meal in prison. Instead, try to find healthy grocery items to create your own meals.

Singer says he now wants to revolutionize college admissions and education with his new company called Future ID Stars, which he says will eliminate the need for college for America’s high school students by identifying their IQ, skills and competitive advantage and then placing them directly. in the workforce.

Monitors show Fox News’ Matt Finn conducting the first interview with Rick Singer, who pleaded guilty in 2019 to racketeering, money laundering and obstruction charges in the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal. (Fox News)

“We have this idea that everyone should go to college, and it’s the right place for everyone. And ‘you have to go to certain schools to be successful.’ And that’s not the truth based on tens of thousands of kids with the which I’ve worked on,” Singer said.

Singer also says she believes experienced mothers who want to re-enter the workforce are a hidden source of reliable employees that have gone untapped.

Singer insists that anything he does moving forward will be done legally and with the review of lawyers, something he admits he wishes he had done all along. Singer claims he has built such a revered name in the admissions world that parents are still contacting him for coaching and were doing so even during his trial.

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“I walk out of the court, outside the court, and I show my lawyer my phone. There are 93 text messages: ‘Are you still coming next week?’

Singer admits the clock never runs out on illegal college admissions in the United States.

Asked if he thinks the college admissions system can still be gamed, and if it’s still being gamed today, Singer replied, “Every day.”