They’re not so smug now.
The daughter of a CEO whose parents allegedly paid big bribes to get her into Georgetown University “gloated” about being fed the answers to her SATs, according to prosecutors.
Isabelle Henriquez’s parents — Manuel, the founder and CEO of Hercules Capital, and Elizabeth — were among dozens of well-heeled moms and dads charged with bribing their kids’ way into top colleges in the massive admissions scam that on Tuesday rocked the nation.
The California couple allegedly paid the scheme’s mastermind, William “Rick” Singer, more than $400,000 to get Isabelle into the prestigious school where she is now a junior — as well as helping her younger sister cheat on her own college-entrance exam.
Singer allegedly talked Isabelle’s private college-preparatory school into allowing one of his crooked proctors to fly in to oversee the test.
Then “unbeknownst to the school, he sat side-by-side with the daughter during the exam and provided her with answers to the exam questions,” court documents allege.
Afterward, “he ‘gloated’ with Elizabeth Henriquez and her daughter about the fact that they had cheated and gotten away with it,” the criminal complaint reads.
Isabelle received a score of 1900 out of a possible 2400 on the exam — “an improvement of 320 points” over her own best score.
But to grease the wheels of her admission even further, the Henriquezes then allegedly worked with Singer to bribe Georgetown’s then-head tennis coach, Gordon Ernst, to have her designated as a recruited athlete.
Singer fabricated an essay and application for Isabelle that falsely claimed she played “club tennis” through high school, held a “top 50 ranking” in junior girls tennis for the United States Tennis Association and was on the USTA all-academic team for her junior and senior years, prosecutors allege.
“At her best, she appears to have ranked 207th in Northern California in the under-12 girls division, with an overall win/loss record of 2-8,” they write in the complaint.
Less than two weeks later, she received a letter from the university saying it had reviewed her application at the request of tennis coach and that her admission was “likely” — and she was ultimately accepted.
Many of the students caught up in the bribery scandal were purportedly in the dark about what their parents were up to — but the criminal complaint alleges Isabelle was a willing participant.
Since arriving at Georgetown, she has declared her major in Spanish, scored a gig as the promotions officer for the school’s student-spirit organization and is president of a group that tutors kids at a local middle school, according to her LinkedIn page.
She says she interned for her father’s firm in 2018, is currently an investment-banking intern at Compass Point Research & Trading — and is slated to be a summer wealth-management analyst at Big Apple financial-services company Jefferies.
In a now-deleted post on a blog for a sociology class, she wrote that she is “very self-motivated” and has a “a good moral compass” when choosing friends.
Isabelle’s Georgetown acceptance was apparently such a success that her parents also allegedly paid to have Singer’s proctor repeat the cheating stunt for their younger daughter on both the ACT and SAT exams.
The dad on Wednesday “voluntarily stepped aside” as chairman and CEO of Hercules Capital after the company’s shares plummeted by as much as 10 percent when the scandal broke.
He and his wife turned themselves in Tuesday and were each released on $500,000 bond.
Both looked stunned as they appeared in court, with Manuel shaking his head and looking at the ground as the judge explained the charges against them, according to Bloomberg.
Georgetown said it wouldn’t comment on individual students, but said in a statement it is “reviewing the details of the indictment and will be taking appropriate action.”
Isabelle did not return a request for comment.