She went to prison in Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Now she says she was a scapegoat
When Donna Heinel arrived at the federal prison camp in Victorville last year to serve a six-month sentence for fraud stemming from the Varsity Blues admissions scandal, she resolved to spend the time productively. She walked two miles in the morning, ran three miles in the afternoon and tutored inmates studying for their high school equivalency exams.
No matter how busy she made herself, though, her thoughts always returned to the same question: How had she, a respected University of Southern California administrator, become the criminal companion of morally bankrupt one-percenters and an outcast from the institution she had long revered?
Like one retracing her steps to find something lost, Heinel started writing down everything she could remember about her career and its implosion, exhausting 20 pencils and five notebooks.
“Nothing made sense,” Heinel said. “USC was my life.”
What she ultimately concluded, the now 63-year-old said in her first media interview since her 2019 arrest, was that she became a scapegoat for USC’s long-standing treatment of affluent applicants, a system the Varsity Blues scandal threatened to expose.
She told The Times she handled the wealthy teens brought to her by corrupt college counselor Rick Singer in similar fashion to hundreds of other well-off applicants USC sent her way as potential sources of donations. Her superiors not only knew about the special treatment but also encouraged it and, in one case, trained her to carry it out, she said.
“I did my job description, and nowhere in time did I think this was nefarious,” she said.
That’s not the view of USC or the U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts, which brought the Varsity Blues charges. Federal prosecutors cast Heinel as “one of the most prolific and culpable participants” in the scheme and criticized her “efforts to minimize, justify, and shift blame.”
They have pointed to $160,000 from Singer that ended up in Heinel’s bank account. Prosecutors maintained that the payments were bribes for admitting underqualified students to USC. She insists that the payments were legitimate and that Singer was purchasing a consulting outfit she ran on the side. In the plea deal she reached with prosecutors, she admitted to a single fraud count stemming from misrepresentations she made to USC admissions officers, but no misconduct directly related to the money. She did agree to forfeit the funds.
Her claim of being betrayed comes as others implicated in Varsity Blues have sought a reconsideration of the scandal. Courts overturned convictions of the three defendants who went to trial — a USC coach accused of taking bribes and two parents seeking admission to the university for their children. In the case of the parents, an appellate court identified flaws in the legal theory for the fraud charges that named USC as the victim — the same type of offense to which Heinel pleaded guilty.
One of those parents, John Wilson, is suing USC, alleging administrators reassured him that Singer’s advice — to donate $100,000 to facilitate his son’s admission — was an accepted practice. USC has called the suit meritless.
Even Singer, the admitted mastermind of the scheme, has attacked the narrative that universities were victimized, saying in a recent Fox News interview: “The media missed that the colleges, they’re my partner in this. It takes two parties to play.”
This fall, The Times detailed a secret system in the USC athletic department that predated Varsity Blues and offered the children of donors and potential donors a much less academically rigorous route to admission. With the help of Heinel, who was the department’s admissions liaison, and her colleagues, the teens were designated as walk-on athletes and admitted through a special committee for sports recruits with an acceptance rate of 85% to 90%. Though the applicants typically played the sport in high school, most were not at USC’s caliber and did not appear on team rosters after they enrolled at the university.
Singer, who had a counseling business in Newport Beach, became aware of the secret system and monetized it by charging parents exorbitant fees to get students admitted as athletes using phony resumes and doctored photos, according to court papers and internal records.
Thousands of emails, applications and other internal university records reviewed by The Times show that Singer’s clients were admitted as walk-ons as early as 2009, though his role was not widely known until 2015 when he showed up on the radar of top athletics administrators.
That summer, Heinel’s boss, USC Athletic Director Pat Haden, summoned her to his office in Heritage Hall to meet with Singer.
“He has good families that may or may not have kids that are student-athletes,” she recalled him telling her.
Heinel had been the department’s admissions point person for five years by then and said she knew “good families” was a common term at USC for people who had the capacity to donate but would not be overly demanding or otherwise embarrass the Trojan family. An attorney for Haden said he did not recall making a statement about “good families” to Heinel.
Haden’s connection with Singer carried immense weight with Heinel, she said. He was a USC hero, an All-American quarterback and Rhodes scholar who had a law degree and decades of experience in private equity. Heinel, who had started as a volunteer in the department in 2003, regarded him as a mentor.
In his office, Haden encouraged Heinel to work directly with Singer, she said. Within days, Heinel received a request for assistance from a Singer client, according to emails reviewed by The Times.
“I see Rick the same way I see Hank Gordon,” she recalled Haden telling her after Singer left.
Gordon, a Las Vegas shopping mall developer, was a generous alumnus who paid for an ornate clock on campus, among other large donations. He was among a group of major donors who routinely referred to Heinel the children of friends and relatives for admission as potential walk-ons or other preferential treatment, internal university records show.
Gordon did not respond to a message seeking comment.
The comparison to Gordon imbued Singer with immediate legitimacy, Heinel said.
“I didn’t think that Pat Haden would be entertaining a criminal and introducing me to this person and asking me to work with him,” she wrote to the judge who sentenced her to prison, according to a copy filed in court.
There’s no evidence that Haden knew of Singer’s illicit conduct. Haden declined an interview request. In a statement to The Times, his lawyer Brandon Fox said any comparison between Singer and Gordon was “preposterous” and disputed that the meeting conferred legitimacy on Singer.
“Mr. Haden is absolutely certain that he never endorsed Mr. Singer or said anything to Ms. Heinel that would cause her to give Mr. Singer credibility,” Fox said. He also stated, “Pat Haden was never prosecuted, nor could he have been, because he did not do anything wrong.”
By the time she met with Singer, Heinel had been at USC for more than a decade and her identity was entwined with the university. She met her wife in a graduate education program and wrote her doctoral dissertation on the experience of Black athletes at schools such as USC. Their two children virtually grew up on campus, and her extended family and friends often joined her at games and campus events, decked out in Trojan cardinal and gold.
“I can’t tell you all the clothes we had from USC,” Heinel’s older sister Barbara recalled. Though her parents and sisters still lived in Pennsylvania, they all became obsessive USC football fans. They traveled to L.A. for games, and, when their father died in 2017, he was buried in his USC hat.
As senior associate athletic director, Heinel oversaw the Galen Center, the university’s indoor arena; a fund for women’s sports; the swimming program; and a handful of other teams. Her role as admissions liaison amounted to only 5% of her responsibilities, according to annual reviews that USC turned over to federal investigators.
She met throughout the year with a subcommittee of admissions officers who decided whether to accept recruited athletes. Unimpressive GPAs and middling test scores were common and commonly overlooked, internal USC records show. The applicants were supposed to be highly sought-after athletes, both scholarship and walk-on.
When she became admissions liaison in 2010, her boss and predecessor in the role, Brandon Martin, taught her to put applicants from deep-pocketed families through as walk-ons, her lawyers said in her sentencing papers. (Martin denied doing so, telling The Times that he put forth only legitimate athletes for admission.)
“A week, week and a half in, I was handed my first packet from development and [told], ‘This is … a donor’s kid,’” she recalled. Heinel said privacy laws barred her from discussing specific applicants.
Heinel said she did not see herself as going rogue, but as joining an established fundraising apparatus.
Emails show athletic fundraisers, coaches and others in the department participated in the system and called upon Heinel to give tours to wealthy families and escort them to meetings with the dean of admissions.
Internal university records also show Haden tracking the children of wealthy or prominent families as Heinel moved them through the subcommittee.
Heinel and her assistants routinely collaborated with donor families to make their application materials more impressive, according to the internal records. They tracked down better action shots, punched up descriptions of high school accomplishments, reformatted the layout of resumes and added language to convey that no scholarship was required: “Parents can afford USC.”
“I would embellish,” Heinel acknowledged. “You don’t want to say, ‘Oh, I sat on the bench and, you know, and when our team was up 30 points, then, then the coach put me in.’”
She said she knew the students were underqualified as athletes and might not ever play, but she didn’t have an ethical problem with it.
“Buildings don’t get built by FAFSA kids, you know,” she said, referring to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. “A private school needs donations to exist.”
Between 2011 and 2018, Heinel and her athletics colleagues advanced the admission of “well in excess of 200” applicants with no connection to Singer — the children of donors, prospective donors and other prominent people, according to filings by her attorneys in her criminal case.
University records reviewed by The Times show that, when donations came in, colleagues heaped praise on Heinel, such as with the $3-million gift from Thai energy billionaire Sarath Ratanavadi, whose son was admitted as a golf player. A spokesperson for Ratanavadi has denied impropriety.
“You were so awesome in those meetings with Sarath. Can’t say enough about how important you were to this windfall,” then-golf coach Chris Zambri wrote in a 2014 email.
When expected contributions didn’t come through, Heinel saw collecting the money as part of her job, according to the internal records. On some occasions, she went as far as confronting the donors who had vouched for the applicants.
“He signed a pledge for 250,000 and has defaulted on his payment,” she said in an email to USC donor Ben Van de Bunt, who had recommended the daughter of Pacific Palisades entrepreneur Greg Thomas. “Can you reach out to him directly. We put a lot of time and effort into her admissions.”
Van de Bunt and Thomas did not return messages seeking comment; it’s unclear whether Thomas fulfilled the pledge.
Donations also came through Singer. His clients deposited more than $1 million between 2015 and 2018 into athletic department coffers that Heinel oversaw, mainly a fund for women’s sports. Prosecutors in the criminal case against Heinel said that, even though the money went to the university, she saw a personal benefit because bringing in the gifts “advanced her career and increased her stature within the athletic department.”
She said she had laudable reasons for welcoming donations from applicants’ parents — whether or not Singer was involved. The funds helped pay for an eating disorder support group for athletes and for women’s teams to travel to tournaments, among other uses.
“Fundraising was, yes, part of my job, but I wasn’t going to get fired if I didn’t do it,” Heinel said.
She insisted she never knew that Singer’s clients were fake athletes. She noted in the interview that the federal investigation turned up text messages between Singer and two former USC coaches on his payroll in which they discussed fabricated athletic resumes, but no such communications with her.
Prosecutors in her criminal case said there was other evidence that she was in on the scam. In 2018, a counselor at Marymount High School in Bel-Air raised questions to a USC administrator about the legitimacy of the admission of the daughter of actor Lori Loughlin, a Singer client, as a walk-on rower. Word got back to Loughlin’s husband, fashion mogul Mossimo Giannulli, who angrily confronted the counselor.
In a voicemail, Heinel warned Singer that if others were “creating any type of disturbance” at private high schools such as Buckley School or Marymount, it would “shut everything down,” according to an FBI agent’s affidavit.
Heinel disputed that the comment was evidence of a conspiracy. She said she meant to convey only that “I don’t want student-athletes’ parents going in and creating disturbances in the high school.”
She was similarly defensive about her handling of the son of water industry entrepreneur Devin Sloane, a Singer client. A high school counselor questioned how the teen could be approved as a water polo walk-on when he didn’t play for the school. Heinel wrote a reassuring email to a USC admissions officer that included his participation in a junior team in Italy and a description of the teen’s speed in the pool, “which helps him win the draws to start play after goals are scored.” The claims were false.
She told The Times that she was parroting information Singer had given her and that his account seemed reasonable because USC had a history of recruiting players in Europe and the coach — later indicted in Varsity Blues — was advocating for the teen’s admission.
When Heinel was arrested, the strongest evidence against her was $160,000 in her bank account. Three years into their working relationship, Singer started paying her $20,000 a month. Investigators had gathered evidence, later laid out in charging papers, that the college counselor had bribed coaches at Yale, Georgetown and USC, and prosecutors saw the money Heinel got as an instance of bribery disguised as “a sham consulting agreement.”
Heinel, however, maintained that the payments were on the up-and-up. In 2005, she launched a business, Clear the Clearinghouse, in which she explained NCAA compliance issues to parents and guidance counselors. She said Singer in 2018 agreed to pay $400,000 in monthly installments to purchase the business.
As evidence, she had a text message informing a colleague of the sale of her business, but she had no written agreement of the transaction — a fact she blamed on Singer.
“The first thing I asked for was a contract,” she said. “He comes back to me and says, ‘You know, Donna, if we do a contract, there’s going to be lawyers involved. They’re going to take a lot of your money that I know you would want to give to your kids regarding their education. So why don’t we do it without lawyers?’”
Heinel contended to The Times that the lag time between the start of their relationship and the payments was not consistent with a payoff.
“It doesn’t make sense. I started working with him in July 2015 and he starts paying me $20,000 three years later. That is not a bribe.”
Still, as her attorney wrote in a sentencing memorandum in 2022, “in hindsight, Dr. Heinel recognizes now that Singer probably offered to buy her business so that she would continue to present his students [as walk-on athletes] without issue.”
Singer had given federal investigators conflicting accounts of the money. When agents first confronted him in September 2018, he said Heinel was “compensated for her compliance work, and was never paid any other way,” according to records cited in filings by Heinel’s lawyers. But in subsequent interviews, he told authorities that Heinel was taking bribes to get specific students admitted.
Singer’s credibility is difficult to assess. While working with federal investigators, he destroyed text messages and alerted at least six families to the federal probe. Prosecutors ultimately opted not to call him as a witness against the three Varsity Blues defendants who went to trial. Singer, who pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2019 and is finishing his sentence at a halfway house, did not return messages from The Times seeking comment.
Under Heinel’s plea deal, she agreed to return the $160,000 in what the government called “criminal proceeds” but did not admit to bribery or conspiracy.
Former Assistant U.S. Atty. Eric Rosen, who was lead prosecutor at the time of Heinel’s arrest, said that he saw the payments as evidence she had grown more comfortable with Singer’s fraud as time went on and wanted a piece of the pie for herself.
“People don’t just all of a sudden go from 0 to 60,” Rosen said. “You gradually put your foot on the accelerator. … You turn around, see if you’re going to get caught. You don’t get caught, and then you do more and more and more.”
::
“Come to the door! Now! Warrant!”
FBI agents armed with assault rifles massed before dawn March 12, 2019, outside Heinel’s home in Naples, a Long Beach neighborhood known for its picturesque canals and good public schools.
Heinel’s wife opened the door, and an agent pointed his weapon inside, the red laser from the gun scope skittering across her entrance hall and landing briefly on the chest of their 9-year-old daughter, according to an account Heinel gave in advance of her sentencing.
“She’s got these pink unicorn pajamas on,” Heinel said in an interview. “That is etched in my mind even now. It haunts me.”
She said she had no idea why agents were there, and, as they led her away in shackles, she waved off her wife’s suggestion that she call an attorney. (Heinel agreed to speak to The Times on the condition that her wife and children not be identified by name.)
“They’ll ask me questions, and I’ll answer them all, and we’ll get this all cleared up — that was my thinking,” Heinel said.
The FBI had conducted similar arrests in wealthy neighborhoods across the country; 55 people would eventually be charged in Varsity Blues. Heinel said that while stuck in a holding cell in downtown L.A., she remained in the dark about why she was in custody. When she was taken for a mug shot, she spotted a list of the others being photographed.
“Some of them I start recognizing, and I see Mossimo [Giannulli],” she said. “And that is when it clicked to me that the common thread of many of these people on this list is Rick Singer.”
At her arraignment, she was handed a copy of the indictment.
“HEINEL was employed as the senior associate athletic director at the University of Southern California,” the first page read. Was, not is, she thought.
USC had fired her earlier that day. The university also called in a loan it had given her to help buy her home.
USC did not respond to questions from The Times about Heinel’s assertion that she was scapegoated. A university spokeswoman said the Varsity Blues prosecutions “confirmed Donna Heinel’s central role in defrauding USC admissions officers and subverting our admissions process.”
As Heinel learned about the evidence, including proof that Singer had helped students cheat on standardized tests, she said, she felt almost dizzy.
She saw Singer as “a psychopath” and expected her colleagues at USC would realize she wasn’t part of his criminal enterprise, she said. They would understand the admissions work she had done was to help the university, she thought.
But days passed, then months, then years, and no one she knew at USC ever reached out.
“It was like everybody did a little moonwalk back and just shut the door,” Heinel’s sister Barbara said.
She had considered Haden, who by then had retired from USC, a close friend. Their families had socialized at games. For his birthday one year, she made a poster of his mother’s favorite sayings. One was, “People are more important than things.” When he developed health problems, fainting on the sidelines of a football game, she said, she helped research doctors.
“Pat was very disappointing to me,” she said.
Haden’s attorney said he had no interest in speaking to a woman he felt had deceived him and the institution he loved.
“Mr. Haden was very fond of Ms. Heinel when they worked together, but her actions — and her unwillingness to take responsibility for her actions — betrayed the trust placed in her by Mr. Haden and USC,” said Fox, the attorney.
Out on bond, Heinel was at loose ends. She drove for ride-hailing companies for a few months, but then the local CBS station tracked her down on a Lyft shift and peppered her with questions.
“Did you take more than a million dollars in bribes to get kids into USC?” CBS reporter David Goldstein asked. “No comment,” Heinel replied.
She spent many days walking around and around her neighborhood talking aloud to herself about her frustrations.
Mounting a legal defense proved monstrously expensive. She drained her retirement accounts and borrowed from relatives to pay bills that topped $600,000. Her lawyers had hoped to tell a jury about USC’s secret system for the rich — “the dark underbelly of admissions,” they called it in court filings.
But the judge ruled much of that irrelevant, and former USC colleagues who collaborated with Heinel in the walk-on admissions process refused to testify, citing their 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.
“Cowards,” she said she recalled thinking. “I would never do that to them. ... I would have tried to help them.”
After 2½ years, her wife sat her down, she said, and asked her to think of the continuing effect of the criminal case on their children.
“I already put my kids through hell in the whole arrest,” she said. They were older now, more likely to understand what was going on. “Your newspaper would have made it a circus, you know, and plastered my face everywhere.”
She agreed to plead guilty to one count of honest services wire fraud related to misleading the admissions subcommittee about two Singer clients.
More than two dozen people submitted letters attesting to Heinel’s character to the sentencing judge in Boston. None was from the people she’d worked with at USC, but many referenced her devotion to the university.
“Donna LOVED USC. She ate and drank cardinal and gold. She was so proud to serve such an amazing school and often talked about how lucky she was to have the job of her dreams,” Stacia Mancini, the captain of their neighborhood watch, wrote in her letter.
A fellow Cub Scout parent, John Sangmeister, himself a USC alum, told the judge, “I fear USC’s win-at-all-cost ethos placed Donna on a difficult career path with options that were not in keeping with her personal character.”
When Heinel finally addressed the judge herself at the January 2023 sentencing in Boston, she did not attack USC or say she had been scapegoated. Instead she accepted blame and made a full-throated apology to the university, its faculty and administrators. She mentioned admissions dean Timothy Brunold and his “great wife and son” and praised Katharine Harrington, former vice president for admissions and planning, for being “a great role model for me.”
“I lost my way. I disgust myself,” she said.
Asked about the display of contrition, she told The Times that she had planned to make a much different statement.
She had written remarks on 3-by-5 cards explaining how unfairly she had been treated by USC, her former colleagues and the federal prosecutors, she said. But the night before, her attorneys told her that doing so would be a mistake. Instead, they said, she should speak about her children, which made her voice quiver with emotion, and apologize profusely.
“I just need to pour it on and beg for forgiveness from the judge,” she recalled them saying.
Her attorney Nina Marino declined to comment, saying, “Communications I have with Dr. Heinel are privileged.”
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani suggested at the sentencing that her own thinking had changed while presiding over Varsity Blues proceedings.
“When this came out and the first charges were filed, there was an, ‘Oh, my goodness. I couldn’t imagine that universities would take money for applicants.’ And then, I think, gradually everybody has said, well, no, some taking money for applicants may be fine,” Talwani said from the bench. “But that’s not what we’re dealing with here.”
Singer’s clients were so manifestly unqualified that by helping get them in, Heinel had dragged the university’s approach to the admission of donor children — legal but unsavory — into the spotlight, the judge suggested.
“It’s very embarrassing to have it come out,” Talwani said. “And so the minimum you do is make sure you don’t do things that are completely false so the whole house of cards falls down. And that’s what she did.”
A different judge had sentenced Singer to 3½ years in prison. For Heinel, prosecutors sought a sentence of two years in prison; Heinel asked for no time in custody. The judge sentenced her to six months.
She was behind bars when a federal appellate court overturned the fraud convictions of two Varsity Blues parents, Wilson and Gamal Abdelaziz. The decision held that the convictions were invalid because jurors were improperly instructed that admission slots were the property of USC.
Heinel, convicted of the same type of fraud, read the decision on her prison bunk.
“What the hell am I here for? What dues am I paying by sitting here,” she recalled thinking.
Heinel was released from the federal prison camp in Victorville in July 2023. As a felon, her employment options are limited, but she said she was working at two startup companies, one offering advice to women entering prison and another related to collegiate athletic eligibility.
She often thinks back to her late-afternoon runs in Victorville. The prison didn’t have USC-quality athletic facilities. The track was a dirt and gravel path in an open field. As she turned to complete the circuit, wind came off the Mojave Desert and buffeted her body.
She pictured the gusts as the people who had abandoned or disappointed her — Singer, the federal prosecutors, her colleagues in athletics and the rest of the Trojan family.
“I would just run my heart out right at that wind and just say, ‘F— you,’ to everybody,” Heinel recalled. “And that’s how I got through it.”
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