college admissions scandal

Olivia Jade’s Dad Has Been Scamming Since His College Days

Mossimo Giannulli.
Mossimo Giannulli. Photo: Scott Wintrow/Getty Images

Long before he was alleged to be involved in what may well be the biggest college admissions scandal in history, Mossimo Giannulli — better known as Lori Loughlin’s husband, or Olivia Jade’s dad — had a college-related scam of his own.

In a recently resurfaced 2016 post on the fashion blog The Hundreds, Giannulli boasted about his days of college swindling in the 1980s, when he was pretending to be a full-time student at the University of Southern California. While CNN reports that Giannulli was enrolled in non-degree program with “no formal admission requirements” at USC in 1984, The Hundreds reports that he falsified report cards to trick his parents into thinking he was a full-time, admitted student in order to get tuition money. And, with that money, he made a foray into the T-shirt industry.

“[USC] was expensive, so that was how I was starting my company,” he said. “I used all that cash … I used to have hundreds of thousands of cash in my top drawer in my fraternity house. And I was like, ‘this is kind of too easy.’”

Within the Giannulli-Loughlin family, this was no secret. Just days before news of the college-admissions scandal broke, Olivia Jade opened up about her dad’s “crazy” college days on The Zach Sang Show.

“I don’t know if I am supposed to say this, sorry dad,” she said on the podcast. “But [he] was like never enrolled in college, he faked his way through it. Yeah, so then he started his whole business with tuition money that his parents thought was going to college.”

Clearly, Giannulli didn’t anticipate that he and his wife would one day be charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud, as well as conspiracy to commit money laundering, for allegedly paying $500,000 to get their two daughters into USC. These revelations of Giannulli’s college days sure shed light on his suspected involvement, though!

Olivia Jade’s Dad Has Been Scamming Since His College Days