First Couple Sentenced in College Scandal Get One Month Each
Couple in Turmoil Face Judge Over ACT Bribe in College Scandal
(Bloomberg) -- The first couple sentenced in the college admissions scandal each got a month in prison, after asking to be spared jail time because their family was in turmoil when they fell prey to a con man who fixed their daughter’s test scores for $125,000.
Gregory Abbott, founder and former chairman of International Dispensing Corp., and his wife, Marcia, a former magazine editor, had asked U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston to sentence them to probation.
“To all those who struggle every day to put food on the table and get their kids access to college, I apologize,” Gregory Abbott, 69, wrote in a letter to Talwani ahead of the sentencing.
He said his acts, spurred by the pressures of a “crumbling family,” were “wrong and stupid” and that he felt “genuine remorse -- not because I was caught, but because taking this shortcut diminished me in my own eyes.”
He stepped down from International Dispensing after pleading guilty in May.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Rosen argued in court filings that the Abbotts deserved eight months in prison each. Of the 11 defendants who have pleaded guilty and are facing Talwani for sentencing, only they engaged twice in the score-boosting fraud, he said.
In court on Tuesday, Rosen called the Abbotts “more brazen” than actor Felicity Huffman and others in the scheme.
“They wanted to win,” he said, “to crush the competition,” pushing till they got “almost perfect scores.”
Before imposing the sentences, the judge rebuked prosecutors for going too far in some of their filings.
“This isn’t a time of glee or gotcha,” said Talwani, who also fined each defendant $45,000 and imposed on each 250 hours of community service. “These are sad events.”
She also said “one could debate how this crime was charged” but added that “the crimes that were charged are serious felonies” that require deterrence.
She granted the defense’s request for staggered sentences, with Marcia Abbott going to jail on Nov. 20 and Gregory Abbott on Jan. 3.
“I wish both of you good luck,” Talwani said.
The Abbotts say they didn’t set out to cheat but made a “terrible mistake” after trying to help their daughter through an illness even as their marriage was falling apart. The girl had Lyme disease, costing her a part-time position as a singer with the Metropolitan Opera, forcing her to leave high school and take courses online, and compromising her performance on standardized tests, they say.
The couple say the con man, Rick Singer, held himself out as the founder of the online school that was providing her coursework.
“The Abbotts make no excuses for what happened next,” their lawyers wrote to Talwani. “Greg and Marcia each knew then that they should walk away. Neither did.”
The Abbotts aren’t celebrities “who ride the highs and lows of public approval, but private people whose 15 minutes of fame is a spotlight on the most difficult chapter in their lives,” their attorneys argued. For that reason, they said, there was no need for a harsher sentence than probation to “afford adequate deterrence” or “protect the public from further crimes of the defendant.”
Rosen said it was the Abbotts who “exploited” the situation to get their daughter extended time to take the ACT entrance exam so she could take the test from home. Singer later arranged for her answers to be rigged to a near-perfect score of 35 out of 36, he said. It cost them $50,000.
A few months later, after she took the SAT II subject tests on her own and got about a 600 out of 800, prosecutors said, the couple paid Singer $75,000 more to have her retested at a center he controlled. Ultimately, she received a perfect score on the math test and a 710 on the literature exam, according to the U.S., submitting the fraudulent scores in her college applications. It’s unclear if the girl was admitted to a college.
In her own letter to the judge, Marcia Abbott, 59, said her daughter had qualified for extended time on standardized tests long before meeting Singer.
“I should have walked away, but by then I saw him as a lifeline, and was afraid what might happen to my daughter if I backed out,” she wrote.
The couple’s daughter sought leniency for her mother.
“Everything my mom has done has been for my health and protection,” she wrote, “and I am horrified and sad that her best intentions for me led her to Rick Singer.”
The case is U.S. v. Abbott, 19-cr-10117, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts (Boston).
To contact the reporters on this story: Patricia Hurtado in Federal Court in Manhattan at pathurtado@bloomberg.net;Janelle Lawrence in Boston at jlawrence62@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey, Steve Stroth
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