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Beverly Hills Mom Heads to Jail for Three Weeks in College Scam

Beverly Hills Mom Heads to Jail for Three Weeks in College Scam

(Bloomberg) -- A Beverly Hills marketing executive and author of self-help books will spend three weeks behind bars for paying $50,000 to fix her son’s college entrance-exam scores, after a federal judge rejected her lawyers’ plea to spare her from jail.

Jane Buckingham is the 11th parent sentenced for rigging the college admissions process through payoffs and deceit. After prosecutors called for a six-month sentence, Buckingham pleaded for mercy.

Beverly Hills Mom Heads to Jail for Three Weeks in College Scam

“There are no excuses,” Buckingham, author of “The Modern Girl’s Guide to Sticky Situations,” told U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston on Wednesday. “I wake up every morning and when I remember what I’ve done and how many people I’ve hurt, I know I will never be able to forgive myself.”

Buckingham pleaded guilty to charges that she paid $50,000 to a purported charity run by the scheme’s mastermind, college admissions counselor Rick Singer, so that an impostor would take her son’s entrance exam.

“I need you to get him into USC,” she said in a conversation that Singer, who ended up cooperating with prosecutors, helped the government record. She went on to joke, “Then I need you to cure cancer” and make peace in the Middle East, according to court papers.

The six-month term prosecutors sought would have been harsher than any of the other sentences imposed on parents so far.

“She orchestrated a complete fraud,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Justin O’Connell said in court.

Talwani was skeptical, noting that Buckingham, unlike other parents, chose not to pay off coaches so her son would win admission as a recruited athlete.

“Are you really asking me to sentence this person on a decision she ended up not taking?” the judge asked.

Of the 10 parents sentenced to jail so far, the three-week sentence was the second- shortest term.

In her plea for mercy Wednesday, Buckingham apologized to her family and offered her thanks to an FBI agent “who made one of the scariest days of my life . . . more bearable.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Janelle Lawrence in New York at jlawrence62@bloomberg.net;Patricia Hurtado in Federal Court in Manhattan at pathurtado@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey

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