I had my doubts when I learned that Netflix’s Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal would be a mix of classic documentary and a series of reenactments in which actor Matthew Modine plays the mastermind Rick Singer. Upon watching, however, these dramatic (albeit a bit cheesy) scenes wield a strange power: Modine acting out Singer’s real-life, wiretapped conversations with high-powered parents only highlights the largest college-admissions scandal in U.S. history’s full outrageous scope. Having covered the day-to-day developments of the case as it unfolded in 2019, I thought I’d feel numb seeing the events revisited. Instead, I was appalled over again.
In the hands of Chris Smith and Jon Karmen, the filmmakers behind Fyre, Operation Varsity Blues revels in the salacious details of privileged behavior. Singer brazenly detailed his felonious “side-door” admissions scam in sprawling phone chats that sound wilder than fiction. “A side door at Harvard is about 1.2 million,” he said, seemingly casually—“side door” being the term he coined to describe the practice of paying colleges to accept students falsified as recruits to “niche sports,” as one talking head aptly brands them, like rowing and water polo. For $300,000 to $500,000, Singer promised parents entry to schools like Georgetown, Boston College, Georgia Tech, and USC. “That’s not bad,” one parent quipped. “Is there a two-for-one special for twins?” another chuckled. As a former prosecutor noted: “It truly is amazing what people will say on the phone when they don’t know that the feds are listening.”
Singer was a charlatan and a salesman, and according to the documentary, his greatest skill was exploiting the anxieties of wealthy parents who have come to view college admissions as a competitive sport and a marker of their own social status. “The parents are applying to college, and the kid is the vehicle through which they apply,” says college counselor Perry Kalmus. “If you’re a parent and you didn’t go to Harvard, this is your chance to now go to Harvard,” Kalmus pauses, “in your warped mind.”
Warped is an apt word to describe how Singer sold his “side door” strategy, including photoshopping high schoolers’ heads onto water-polo or football action shots—“I’m going to make him a kicker,” Singer quips to one parent of a child—and selling SAT and ACT scores for $75,000 a pop. He brags about doing more than 700 of the deals, framing them as a sure bet compared to the even more exclusive “back door.” That’s lingo for making a hefty donation in hopes of gaining admission, but Singer warned that there were no guarantees, claiming “back door” admission at Harvard was running parents $50 million. Singer succeeded in duping private-equity and corporate-law heads and one Hot Pockets heiress into believing that paying one’s way into college was not, as some suspected, illegal but a new normal. “Pretty funny the way the world works these days,” one parent marvels, as if they’re talking about TikTok and not white-collar crime that would later land many of them in jail.
Voyeurism reaches its peak about an hour in, when Olivia Jade Giannulli, beauty influencer and daughter of Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, makes her first appearance, setting her fake lashes with an eyelash curler in a YouTube tutorial. (Felicity Huffman, the other of the most famous defendants, does not really feature.) A fleeting, damning moment follows, when a photo flashes of Olivia Jade posing on a rowing machine in flowery athleisure leggings: a photo that would be used for Singer’s photoshopping purposes. Loughlin and Giannulli paid $500,000 to edge Olivia Jade and her sister, Bella, into USC, with Singer passing them off as coxswains on the crew team.
More footage, in selfie mode, shows Olivia Jade slogging through her first day of senior year, lamenting, “I’ve gone to one class, and I already want to die.” She was open about wanting to quit high school but said that Loughlin wouldn’t let her and her dad “made me go to college.” Questions were inevitably raised among classmates, and her school’s guidance counselor, about how both she and her sister gained entry to an increasingly competitive school. In emails between Singer and the Giannullis weighing whether Olivia Jade should list USC as her top-choice school, Mossimo writes, “yes...but it might be a flag for the weasel to meddle,” a reference to the counselor. “Fuck him,” he wrote, calling the staffer a “nosy bastard.” In a conversation with a USC admissions official, the counselor flagged that he “had no knowledge of Olivia’s involvement in crew and highly doubted she was involved in the sport.” When Mossimo learned of that conversation, according to the doc, he showed up at the counselor’s office in a rage, accusing the counselor of trying to “ruin” his daughters’ opportunities.
“I’m not worried about the moral issue here,” Giannulli—as played by an actor—says in another confrontation. “I’m worried about, she gets caught doing this, she’s finished.” That statement was, of course, prescient. The scandal touched a nerve when it broke because it was a maddening glimpse at the way the wealthy attempted to game a system that already benefits them, with access to test prep and tutors that the 1 percent can readily afford.
“Why did the parents choose to cheat when their children had so much already?” one college-prep expert asked. But the story, and the documentary, also taps into the sense of schadenfreude that came with the FBI bust, the sentences of the white, wealthy, and privileged flashing across the screen near the end. Many of the parents or couples spent a mere few months in jail, in glaring contrast with the other justice system that exists for people of color in the U.S. Still, it was a tiny shred of justice. “In America, we love the wealthy and we hate the wealthy,” New Yorker staff writer Naomi Fry says in the documentary. “They disgust us, and they fascinate us.”