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, s.
