Georgetown University’s former tennis coach is among those indicted on a charge of racketeering conspiracy as part of a sweeping series of allegations of college admissions bribery and cheating.
Georgetown University’s former tennis coach is among those indicted on a charge of racketeering conspiracy as part of a sweeping series of allegations of college admissions bribery and cheating.
Gordon Ernst was the head men’s and women’s coach at Georgetown University for 12 seasons, leaving in 2018 to coach at the University of Rhode Island.
Charging documents made public Tuesday said that William Singer, who pleaded guilty later in the day to a variety of charges, paid a total of more than $2.7 million in bribes between 2012 and 2018 to “a Georgetown tennis coach” in order to designate about 12 applicants as Georgetown tennis recruits, “thereby facilitating their admission to the university.”
Georgetown said in a statement Tuesday that Ernst hadn’t coached the tennis team since December 2017 “following an internal investigation that found he had violated University rules concerning admissions.”
The university added that it had “cooperated fully” with prosecutors and was “deeply disappointed” in the allegations.
Prosecutors said in a news conference Tuesday that parents nationwide paid Singer, who ran the consulting service The Edge College and Career Network, a total of $25 million between 2012 and 2018 for a variety of services, disguising the payments as donations to Singer’s nonprofit charitable organization, the Key Worldwide Foundation. Singer would then use the money for a variety of purposes to get the parents’ children into elite schools.
In a statement Tuesday afternoon, prosecutors released a partial transcript of a phone call Singer had with a parent.
“Okay, so… what we do is we help the wealthiest families in the U. S. get their kids into school,” Singer said. “… My families want a guarantee. So, if you said to me ‘here’s our grades, here’s our scores, here’s our ability, and we want to go to X school’ and you give me one or two schools, and then I’ll go after those schools and try to get a guarantee done.
