I’m amazed at how popular the clip below has become given how thin the claims in it are. For starters, it’s wholly subjective. It allegedly took Harlow Brooks “six hours a night” to do the homework — a likely exaggeration — and so, she reasons, it must have taken Loughlin’s daughter, Olivia Giannulli, a similar amount of time. But that doesn’t follow. They might not even have had the same classes.
It’s the same school the Kardashians attended. You don’t need a PhD to graduate.
And according to the school, Brooks only lasted there three days. If that’s true, she can’t possibly know firsthand what the standard nightly workload was. Most of the details in the clip might be nothing more or less than gossip circulated by students from rival schools.
Alternately, what reason is there to think Brooks isn’t lying through her teeth, satisfying some grudge she holds against Giannulli or impugning her out of some ulterior motive? Turns out Brooks is an “aspiring actress” whose own YouTube videos typically pull thousands of views whereas Giannulli’s regularly pull hundreds of thousands and occasionally more than a million. Now, after insinuating that there might have been some chicanery behind Giannulli’s high-school education, Brooks’s last two clips are each over a million and various tabloid news outlets are paying her attention, including “Inside Edition,” which put her on TV. Go figure.
On the other hand, in light of recent events, it’s obviously not out of the realm of possibility that Giannulli had some parental help with her homework, so to speak. “An arrangement with the school or something?” wonders Brooks about Giannulli’s management of the course load. Giannulli wasn’t shy about expressing her disinterest in academia and Brooks’s puzzlement that she was somehow balancing classwork at an elite high school with a de facto career in social-media “influencing” seems valid enough. What was her daily schedule like? What if the “college admissions scandal” is also a “high-school graduation scandal”?
How likely is it that a kid would have spent much time studying if she even needed someone to fill out her college applications for her? I ask you.
According to court documents released by The Atlantic, Giannulli may not have even filled out her own application for the school she would later be accepted to. Loughlin, who was released on $1 million bond for her role in paying $500,000 to Singer to make it look like her daughters rowed crew, reportedly e-mailed the organizer to get guidance on how to complete the USC application in a way that wouldn’t raise red flags.
“[Our younger daughter] has not submitted all her colleges [sic] apps and is confused on how to do so,” Loughlin allegedly wrote in December 2017. “I want to make sure she gets those in as I don’t want to call any attention to [her] with her little friend at [her high school]. Can you tell us how to proceed?”
Singer allegedly then directed an employee to fill out and submit the applications on behalf of Giannulli. If true, it would mean that the YouTube star didn’t lift much of a finger to get herself into USC.
She was “confused” about how to submit a college application?
I think the newsiest thing about the clip is the evidence it offers of how intense public interest is in Loughlin and the scandal. Brooks has over three million views for this gossipy ephemera, such is America’s appetite for more dirt on how the beautiful people are rigging the educational system to their and their children’s advantage. Gotta figure that if there’s anything to Brooks’s insinuation, people at the school — possibly even teachers, considering how tabloids are known to pay for stories — will start leaking what they know about how Giannulli and her sister qualified for their diplomas.
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