A gripping, insightful, humorous firsthand account on the Varsity Blues College Admissions Scandal as seen through the eyes of a parent.
From the moment armed federal officers barged into his bedroom at dawn, dragging him away in irons without telling him the nature of his crime, Greg Abbott recounts his experiences all the way through federal prison. Without skirting any wrongdoing, Abbott humanizes a case otherwise marked by federal abuse and one-dimensional, often flagrantly dishonest media portrayals. He shares why he paid $125,000 to Rick Singer's Key Worldwide Foundation to support his daughter's standardized test scores, how he believed it was a humane, one-off accommodation for her physical disability-a severe form of Lyme disease that robbed his otherwise accomplished daughter of focus. The author shares unsettling truths about how lives otherwise blessed, even exemplary at times, can become cursed by a single false step taken out of love and compassion, not crass ambition. Such a misstep can incur the government's wrath where none was needed and become endless grist for media and internet mills to satisfy our insatiable appetites for schadenfreude. His story, in the mere telling, exposes the real scandals of Varsity Blues and explains why citizens of all political stripes should be concerned. "We are merely one side of this multifaceted infamy," he writes.