White girl accepted to three colleges after pretending to be Black tennis prodigy on paper

Aftershocks from the widespread college admissions scandal reveal that one girl pretended to be African American on her applications and it got her into three different schools

Kia Morgan-Smith

Aug 1, 2019

(Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

A new report has emerged in the college admissions scandal that surfaced earlier this year, revealing that a white girl’s parents presented her on paper as a Black tennis whiz kid in order to gain entry into college.

According to Vanity Fair the girl’s father, Adam Bass, hired William “Rick” Singer, who was convicted of orchestrating the widespread college scam, for “college counseling.” Bass is a lawyer and considered to be wealthy. According to the explosive report released on Wednesday, his daughter’s application described her as a Black tennis player who was the first to go to college. It was accepted by at least three colleges, the magazine reports.

In fact, the girl has no previous tennis experience, the report says.

The counselor at the Buckley School, the elite private school the girl attended in Sherman Oaks, Calif., raised red flags about her application a year before the college admission scandal was uncovered.

According to the report, Bass’s daughter ultimately went to Berkeley through the traditional college application process. He has not been charged with a crime and remains as a board member at Buckley.

The Bass family released a statement saying they were not in cahoots with Singer and were instead shocked when they learned their daughter’s application contained lies.

“The Bass family was furious and upon learning more about Mr. Singer’s wrongdoing over the course of that weekend, they immediately began contacting schools to supply them with accurate information,” the statement reads, CBS News reports.

Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin were charged along with nearly 50 other people in a scheme in which wealthy parents bribed college coaches and insiders at testing centers to help get their children into some of the most elite schools in the country, federal prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said parents paid an admissions consultant from 2011 to 2019 to bribe coaches and administrators to label their children as recruited athletes, to alter test scores and to have others take online classes to boost their children’s chances of getting into schools.

The AP contributed to this report.