A gold-crazed staffer at Manhattan’s elite Trinity School – which counts John McEnroe and Eric Trump as former students – was busted Friday for ringing up $400,000 in luxury goods on a school credit card.
Administrative assistant Kirsten Olsen, 45, was supposed to be monitoring Trinity’s credit account but instead used it to score $150,000 in gold bullion – along with hundreds of thousands of dollars in jewelry and fancy clothes.
She even used the card to fund a 2015 trip from Los Angeles to New York, prosecutors said.
Assistant District Attorney Peter Rienzi told Justice Charles Solomon that his office is still investigating an additional $50,000 in questionable charges.
The Queens con artist – who worked under the head of school fundraising – masked the three-year looting from May 2013 to May 2016 with faked documentation and doctored records, Rienzi said.
She hid her frenzied gold-buying binges by claiming the money was spent on printing expenses for reunion events, according to Rienzi.
The scheme began to unravel last June when a supervisor confronted her about a suspicious $14,500 payment to a PayPal vendor and she presented phony paperwork to account for it, prosecutors said.
Olsen’s lawyer, David Cohen, pinned blame for her misconduct on mental problems Friday.
“She had significant issues, psychological and otherwise, that caused her to engage in this conduct,” he said, noting that she’s in therapy.
Olsen pleaded not guilty to one count of grand larceny and was released on $150,000 bail posted by her family.
Stunned administrators at Trinity – where annual tuition costs nearly $50,000 a year – sent out a lengthy email detailing the fraud Friday.
“We are shocked and deeply troubled by this employee’s betrayal of the Trinity community,” the email said. “We profoundly regret that she was able to engage in her acts of fraud at the School.”
Trinity hired a forensic accounting firm to assess the full extent of Olsen’s fraud and assured parents that “we have been able to recover the full amount of the fraudulent losses through our insurance coverage.”
The email stressed that the school was tightening its financial security and accounting practices in the wake of Olsen’s brazen theft.
“We profoundly regret that this criminal activity occurred and are resolute in our commitment to improve our financial oversight processes to minimize opportunity for fraud,” the letter said.
In addition to heightened scrutiny of school related expense accounts, Trinity planned to “significantly curtail the number of corporate credit cards,” according to the note.
Olsen is due back in court in August.