James Weir: Brutal irony of Aunt Becky and the Hollywood cheating scam

Aunt Becky poses with two "elite rowers". Photo / AP

COMMENT: When Aunt Becky and that Desperate Housewife became ensnared in the wild Hollywood cheating scam this week, countless questions arose.

What does Teri Hatcher think? If Aunt Becky ends up in the slammer, will it be enough to make the Olsen twins resurface? And most importantly: where did Aunt Becky get $500,000 from?

That's the figure prosecutors allege former Full House star Lori Loughlin — who played Aunt Becky — and her husband Mossimo Giannulli paid in bribes to have their two daughters accepted into the University of Southern California as recruits on the row team even though they're not even rowers, reports news.com.au.

It's very convoluted and probably made even more confusing because we refuse to call Aunt Becky by her real life name, but just hang in there.

Almost immediately after Aunt Becky … I mean, Lori Laughlin … was arrested for her involvement in the elite scheme, her words about her daughters' education came back to haunt her.

" … We were never like, 'At school you got to get straight A's.' We were never those parents," she proudly declared.

Hindsight's cruel and we have no doubt she now absolutely wishes she pushed those two brats to get a half-decent grade every now and then.

Making it all the more bitter for Aunt Becky, and more hilarious for us, is the girls didn't even want to go to university anyway. Particularly the younger one — Olivia Jade. She's 19 and a vlogger and already you can probably get a sense of what her thoughts about school are.

"I don't know how much of school I'm gonna attend but I'm gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all," she says in one of her resurfaced vlogs in which she stresses about how she'll juggle studying along with the demands of her YouTube channel. "But I do want the experience of like game days, partying … I don't really care about school, as you guys all know."

Many of the students involved in the scheme actually had no idea their parents paid to get them into these schools. It's almost endearing they didn't know how dumb they actually are.

The scheme was essentially two-fold and included paying bribes to inflate standardised test scores and fake athletic records to get students recruited for sports they didn't play. The fake sport option is the one Aunt Becky allegedly paid for — and it required her to get pretty crafty.

This is how dumb Aunt Becky's kids are: Aunt Becky allegedly made her daughters pose for a photo while seated on rowing machines as fake proof they're rowers, and not once did they question why their mum was making them sit on rowing machines for a photo.

It's my favourite part of the whole mess.

The only upside? That Desperate Housewife and Aunt Becky can play themselves in the telemovie.