Over the past few days, details have emerged of a college admissions scam involving at least 50 parents in the USA. Actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman are amongst those who have been indicted on charges of fraud, as news broke that they had bribed their way in to top college places for their children.
Now, one mother is taking further legal action against them.
Deadline reports that Jennifer Kay Toy, a schoolteacher, is suing the accused for $500 billion in damages, claiming that her son was deprived of a higher quality education because of their actions.
"Joshua [Toy's son] applied to some of the colleges where the cheating took place and did not get in," said the teacher, who has won awards in her profession.
"Joshua and I believed that he’d had a fair chance just like all other applicants but did not make the cut for some undisclosed reason," she continued, explaining that her son had a 4.2 GPA, and should have been prioritised over the likes of Olivia Jade (Loughlin's daughter) or Sophia (Huffman's daughter).
"I’m not a wealthy person, but even if l were wealthy l would not have engaged in the heainous and dispicable [sic] actions of defendants," she wrote in a lawsuit.
"I'm now outraged and hurt because I feel that my son, my only child, was denied access to a college not because he failed to work and study hard enough but because wealthy individuals felt that it was ok to lie, cheat, steal and bribe their children's way into a good college."
In order to attain places at elite schools, the wealthy parents of children had been bribing sports coaches to accept their kids instead of scholarship students, paid proctors to amend exam papers, and even hired other people to take the tests in their children's place.
Some students have been accused of feigning learning difficulties in order to gain access to private testing facilities, thus making it easier to cheat on exams. Other students, however, were apparently unaware that their parents had gone behind their back to con their way into top colleges.
The whole thing was allegedly masterminded by William Singer, who ran a college prep company called The Key.
"What we do is we help the wealthiest families in the US get their kids into school," he was recorded saying to a client in 2018. "They want guarantees, they want this thing done. They don’t want to be messing around with this thing."
The scheme had been running since at least 2011.
This is the second lawsuit to have been filed against those facing fraud charges, after a group of students and their parents filed a complaint against the University of Southern California, Yale University, and other colleges earlier this week. In the suit, they claim that they were denied a fair opportunity, and deserve a refund of their application fee.
While it is unlikely that Toy will be successful in her claim for $500 billion, she may have some legal standing in her claims that her son was unfairly rejected from his chosen colleges.