The 33 parents charged in the scandal are mostly accused of paying the consultant, William Singer, either tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to facilitate cheating on admissions tests or to bribe coaches or other officials so that their children could be admitted to schools as recruited athletes.
But the prosecutors leading the largest-ever college admissions prosecution have also alluded to other families, not named and not charged, who paid far more. One family paid Singer $6.5 million to get their child into college through the recruitment scheme, the prosecutors have said. Another was described in court documents as having paid Singer $1.2 million in connection with their daughter’s application to Yale.
Prosecutors said that the daughter, whom they called Yale Applicant 1 in court documents, was admitted to Yale as a recruit for the women’s soccer team, despite not being a competitive soccer player. According to documents charging Rudolph Meredith, the former women’s soccer coach at Yale, Singer had paid Meredith a bribe to designate the young woman as a recruit for the team. Singer has pleaded guilty to racketeering and other charges, and Meredith has pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges.
On Friday, Yale Applicant 1 was identified as Sherry Guo, a young woman from China who was a freshman at Yale until March, according to her lawyer, James Spertus.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston, Christina Sterling, declined to comment on Guo’s case. Asked why Guo and her parents — as well as the still unidentified family that was said to have paid Singer $6.5 million — have not been charged in the case, she said, “I cannot comment other than to say it is an ongoing investigation.”
According to the charges against Meredith, Guo and her family were introduced to Singer in 2017 by a financial adviser in Los Angeles.
According to the charging documents, Singer mailed Meredith a check for $400,000 in 2018, and later that year, Guo’s relatives paid Singer $1.2 million in several installments, $900,000 of which was sent to a nonprofit foundation Singer had set up, and which prosecutors argue was used to hide much of Singer’s and his clients’ illicit activity.
Spertus said that Guo and her parents did not know that the payment was going toward a bribe. Her parents did not speak English and were not in direct contact with Singer, he said, while Guo herself was naive about how the college admissions process worked in the United States.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.