It was so not like Jane Buckingham to behave this way. After all, she was the model for a responsible, successful, hip 21st-century parent. She built her career on being an expert in millennial and Generation Z trends, she wrote articles on parenting, gave talks on the subject, was featured on shows like Good Morning America and Today. We parents need to be more chill, she told people in her girlish, approachable way. Let our kids make mistakes. Don't bulldoze a path for them. And yet here she was, committing a crime in order to give her son a leg up.
Summer of 2018, and the time had come for Jack, a rising senior at Los Angeles's tony Brentwood School, to take the ACT. Buckingham had hired Rick Singer to shepherd them through the college application process. And Singer knew how to make the test easy for Jack—so easy that he wouldn't even have to take it himself. Thanks to a provision for students with learning disabilities, and two alleged Singer coconspirators in Houston—master test taker Mark Riddell and test administrator Niki Williams—Jack would be able to “take” the ACT from the comfort of his own home while awaiting a tonsillectomy. Riddell, as Jane knew, would take the actual test—and score brilliantly. Later, Williams would submit that fabulous test to the ACT. Singer just needed one more thing: a handwriting sample from Jack so that Riddell could fake the essay portion convincingly. Jane asked Jack to provide one. “To whom it may concern,” Jack wrote in distinct, uneven lettering, “this provides an example of my current writing style. Thank you for your attention.” Jane snapped a picture of it and emailed it along. She knew she was acting bananas and tried to laugh it off. “I know this is craziness,” she said to Singer. “I know it is. And then I need you to get him into USC, and then I need you to cure cancer and make peace in the Middle East.” Then she forked over $35,000 of a promised $50,000 to Singer's Key Worldwide Foundation and waited for her son to get into the University of Southern California.
Read Full Article »