Two and a half years after the college admissions scandal rocked her career, Lori Loughlin is making a return to the acting world.
The actress, 57, is poised to guest star on Season 2 of the “When Calls the Heart” spinoff “When Hope Calls,” Bill Abbott, the president and CEO of GAC Media, announced Tuesday.
She’ll reprise her original role from the series, Abigail Stanton, and will appear in the first two episodes, which center around a town in the running for the title of America’s No.1 Country Christmas Town.
The Hallmark Channel series features a young woman from the high society who makes a move to a small-town.
Season 2 will be exclusively on the GAC Family channel. Loughlin’s debut acting gig since the March 2019 scandal.
In December, Loughlin was released from a two-month stint in prison; her fashion designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli, got five months for paying half a million dollars in bribes to get their two daughters, Olivia Jade Giannulli and Isabella Giannulli, accepted into the University of Southern California as crew recruits even though neither played the sport.
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The couple asserted their innocence from the time they were arrested in March 2019. For more than a year, their attorneys mounted a vigorous defense seeking dismissal of the case, arguing Loughlin and Giannulli believed they were making “legitimate donations” to USC, not bribing college officials.
Fellow actress and “Desperate Housewives” star Felicity Huffman was the first parent in the scandal to be sentenced and was handed 14 days in prison, a $30,000 fine, supervised release for one year and 250 hours of community service.After the controversy broke, “When Calls The Heart” wrote Loughlin’s character off, explaining that Abigail Stanton decided to travel from their Canada hometown to the East Coast with her son Cody to care for her ill mother.
“It’s been a week since Abigail got word that her mother had taken ill back east,” She writes. “True to her nature, Abigail wasted no time in rushing off to take care of her. Abigail is much more than a friend. She’s family and I will miss her and Cody deeply. We all will. But we must get by as best we can.”
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Loughlin isn’t the only one in her family bouncing back after backlash over the scandal. Her younger daughter, Olivia Jade Giannulli, is currently competing on “Dancing With the Stars.”
In December, Olivia Jade Giannulli spoke for the first time publicly about the scandal with Jada Pinkett Smith, Pinkett Smith’s mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris, and daughter Willow Smith, on Facebook Watch’s “Red Table Talk.”
“I wasn’t aware of what was going on,” she said on the Dec. 8 episode. “I did work hard and when this did come out, I was a little confused… It would be so horrible if people understood how terrible this was.”
Giannulli also addressed her privilege in the show.
“That’s embarrassing within itself that I walked around my whole 20 years of life not realizing, like you have insane privilege,” she said. “You’re like the poster child of white privilege and you had no idea.”
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Contributing: Maria Puente, Sara M. Moniuszko and Erin Jensen
