Before College Admissions Scandal, Mossimo Giannulli Lied About Going to College, Used Tuition Money Anyway

For a couple who are so offended by being called cheaters for their role in the college admissions scandal, Lori Loughlin’s husband, Mossimo Giannulli, previously admitted in interviews that he lied to his parents about going to the University of Southern California in the 1980s and instead used the tuition money they sent him for his own personal ends.

Faking report cards and tuition bills, Giannulli got his dad to hand over tens of thousands as he claimed he was getting a first-class university education. Taking the money, he funded his lifestyle in the golden state and also started the self-appellation t-shirt company, Mossimo.

“SC was expensive, so that was how I was starting my company. I used all that cash,” Giannulli told fashion blog,The Hundreds in a profanity-laced interview in 2016. The same year his interactions with Richard Singer, the college admissions cheating mastermind, allegedly began.

Like father, like daughter.

The lying was apparently an amusing story to tell since Giannulli’s subterfuge paid off financially as the Mossimo brand took off in the 1990s. But it clearly didn’t do the designer or his family any good ethically in the long run as Giannulli, wife Lori, and both daughters have paid dearly for their participation in the college scam.

Prior to the scandal, Giannulli’s daughter, Olivia Jade, said during an interview that she knew all about his scheming to get money from his parents by lying about attending college.

“I don’t know if I am supposed to say this, sorry dad. But [he] was like never enrolled in college, he faked his way through it. Yeah, so then he started his whole business with tuition money that his parents thought was going to college.”

Olivia Jade would later go on to vlog (video blog) about how she had no interest in going to college and would use her time at USC to build her brand. It’s too bad her father didn’t recognize himself in his younger daughter and realize she was on her way to building a successful brand and business without college. Olivia Jade’s budding beauty influencer career is certainly now on hold, if not dead forever.

However, Mossimo Giannulli believing that lying and cheating pay off — not work ethic and business savvy– has finally come back to bite his family.