Hot Pockets Heiress Sentenced in College Admissions Scandal, Cue the Gretchen Weiners Jokes
The heiress to the Hot Pockets fortune was sentenced on Tuesday (February 25) for her involvement in the U.S. college admissions scandal case.
Michelle Janavs is among 53 parents charged with conspiring with college admissions consultant William "Rick" Singer to get their children into top universities using fraud and bribery. In March 2019, Singer pleaded guilty to charges of "facilitated cheating on college entrance exams and helped bribe sports coaches at universities to present his clients’ children as fake athletic recruits," Reuters reports.
Prosecutors claimed that Janavs paid the consultant $100,000 to have someone take the ACT exam for her daughters to increase their scores. Mark Riddell, who corrected her daughters' answers or took the exams for them, also pleaded guilty.
Prosecutors also reported that the mother bribed a USC athletic official with $200,000 to claim that one of her daughters was an elite beach volleyball player at the college. According to lawyers, USC rescinded her daughter's admissions offer.
According to The LA Times, Janavs was sentenced to five months in prison. Prosecutors were initially seeking a 21-month prison stay for the heiress, Bloomberg reports.
Previously serving as an executive at Chef America Inc., Michelle Janavs is the daughter Paul Merage, one of the co-developers of Hot Pockets. The popular snack was sold to Nestle in 2002 for $2.6 billion.
While Hot Pockets is not the same as the similarly microwavable pastry snack Toaster Strudel, social media users began to compare Janavs to Gretchen Wieners from Mean Girls, the character (played by Lacey Chabert) whose father invented Toaster Strudel, which she bragged about during the film.
One Twitter user wrote, "Overheard in court, probably: 'I don’t think my father, the inventor of Hot Pockets, would be too pleased to hear about this.'"
See some of the funniest memes and reactions about the Hot Pockets heiress' connection to the Mean Girls Plastic, below.