A former southern California media executive who pleaded guilty to a single charge in the huge college admission scandal the feds named Operation Varsity Blues says her plea should be thrown out — but prosecutors say her argument is “built on an Alice-in-Wonderland version of events.”
Elisabeth Kimmel, of Las Vegas and of La Jolla, Calif., the once-owner of San Diego-area TV news business Midwest Television Inc., entered an agreement in August 2021 in which she pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.
While the charge carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, Kimmel served a merely six-week sentence in a medical prison, followed by a year of home detention and another year of supervised release. Kimmel said she suffered heart problems following her arrest in California on March 20, 2019, and once came to federal court in Boston in a wheelchair.
“Mrs. Kimmel’s conviction and sentence violate the Constitution because her guilty plea was based on misinformation and therefore was not voluntary or intelligent,” her defense argued in a motion last month signed by attorney Andrew Nathanson.
The motion states that she was in frail health “and feared that the additional stress of a lengthy trial would risk her life” when she pleaded guilty.
Since that plea, the U.S. Supreme Court found last year in Ciminelli v. U.S. that, her lawyers wrote, “that because the mail and wire fraud statutes reach only ‘traditional property interests,’ the ‘right to control’ something does not create a cognizable property interest.”
It’s under this technicality that her argument that her plea be thrown out rests.
When she agreed to pay primary Varsity Blues fraudster William “Rick” Singer $275,000 to fraudulently obtain one of six tennis scholarship spots at Georgetown University for her daughter — who did not play tennis, let alone at a level that would qualify her for a scholarship at an elite, Division 1 school — and $250,000 for her non-pole vaulting son a scholarship on as a pole vaulter at the University of Southern California, it wasn’t theft of property in the way she had been charged.
But federal prosecutors wrote in a response Monday that the argument is weak, that by filing it she had broken her plea agreement and that other relevant case law overrides her argument.
“It is also utterly without merit, built on an Alice-in-Wonderland version of events,” prosecutors wrote before a list of other relevant case law.
“The indisputable reality is this: the defendant — a Harvard-educated former lawyer represented by experienced counsel — was charged with traditional property fraud in an indictment alleging that admission slots are property,” the federal response continued. “She knowingly and voluntarily pleaded guilty to that crime. And Ciminelli — by its own holding — has no bearing on that conviction.”
They wrote that shortly after entering the plea bargain, in which she gained the “considerable benefits” of the very short prison time and the dismissal of several charges of harsher penalties, Kimmel “waived her right to appeal or collaterally attack her conviction.”
