Hot Pockets Heiress Denied Home Jailing in College Scam Case

(Bloomberg) -- Hot Pockets heiress Michelle Janavs and Silicon Valley mom Elizabeth Henriquez will be going to prison for paying bribes in the U.S. college admissions cheating scandal, after a judge denied their bids to serve their sentences at home due to coronavirus fears.

U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton in Boston said Thursday the risk posed by the virus seemed to have lessened.

“Although the current public health crisis is not ended, it has abated and will likely to continue to abate over the next few months,” the judge said in rejecting the women’s request.

Janavs, whose father and uncle invented the microwaveable frozen snack before selling their company to Nestle SA in 2002, was given a five-month sentence in February after admitting she paid $300,000 to rig her daughters’ test scores and have one falsely designated a University of Southern California beach volleyball recruit. Henriquez was sentenced in March to seven months in prison after she pleaded guilty to paying $400,000 to cheat her daughter’s way into Georgetown University.

The judge said he’d allow Janavs to postpone beginning her sentence until Aug. 31. Gorton previously ordered Henriquez to report to prison by June 30 but did not say in his order Thursday if he’d also allow her to delay her sentence.

Gorton’s denial contrasts with other judges who have released or sentenced white-collar convicts to home confinement due to the pandemic. A former Goldman Sachs banker who pleaded guilty to insider trading was sentenced Tuesday to a year of home confinement. President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was last month released to spend the remainder of his 7-1/2-year fraud sentence at home.

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