Douglas Hodge, the former Pimco chief accused of using a middleman to cheat his kids’ way into elite colleges, offered a glimpse of his defense on July 22: He made donations, not bribes.
“It’s not the case those were corrupt payments,” his lawyer Brien O’Connor told a federal judge at a hearing in Boston.
Douglas Hodge
Photographer: Galit Rodan/Bloomberg
Hodge will show that the payments he made to a nonprofit foundation run by William “Rick” Singer—the confessed mastermind of the biggest college admissions fraud the U.S. has ever prosecuted—were just like large donations he’d made over the years to support higher education long before ...