Aunt Becky's Daughters' Couldn't Even Fake Rowing Photos

In one of the dumbest scandals from the past year, Lori Loughlin (Aunt Becky from Full House) and her husband Mossimo Giannulli were implicated in a ring of wealthy people who had bribed various schools to let in their children with faked resumes. In Loughlin's case, her daughters Olivia Jade and Isabella Rose posed as crew athletes in order to get on the crew team at the University of Southern California. (Which concludes possibly the whitest sounding paragraph we've ever written on this site.)

Yes, crew, as in rowing. The collegiate sport that famously requires stupid amounts of money to participate, 5:00 am practices off-campus, and that no one gives a shit about outside of that 90-second scene in The Social Network.

That sounds like exactly the type of thing a couple of wealthy high school-age Instagram influencers would want to do. Because the then-teens definitely weren't rowing on the real down a river, they needed posed photographs of the two on an indoor rowing machine. And thanks to the prosecutors, those posed photographs have been released.

Massachusetts Federal Court

Massachusetts Federal Court

First, nobody under 45 in a gym actually uses the rowing machine for more than just pretending to do cardio while actually contemplating how hard it would be to cancel their membership contract -- and certainly not to take photos on. That wooden rower's heyday, like their mom's, was back in the 90s before people had cable (resistance bands/television). Even stupider, in Olivia Jade's photo, the machine's screen doesn't even appear to be on and it's hard to tell if her feet are even strapped in.

The prosecution is taking a fair amount of pride in these photos, because they're supposed to be the sort of smoking-gun connection with a series of emails between Giannulli and the supposed ringleader of the scam, Rick Singer. In an email to Giannulli, Singer suggests, quote, "It would probably help to get a picture with her on an ERG in workout clothes like a real athlete too." It would probably also have helped if the "student-athletes" had bothered to take two seconds to research how to actually pose on the machines.

Look, they won't be the first people to lie about their athletic prowess using staged gym photos, and they certainly won't be the last, but they're probably the highest-stakes ones ever taken. When we pretend to workout, but secretly fuck-off to get a smoothie, it just costs us our dignity, not possible jail time.

Top Image: Kathy Hutchins / Shutterstock.com