The Desperate Housewives star finally opened up about the college admissions scandal that happened four years ago.
On Thursday, Felicity Huffman, 60, sat down for an interview with ABC7 Eyewitness News where she spoke about the 2019 college admissions scandal.
The Transamerica actress admitted that the entire ordeal was “crazy” at the time, adding:
“People assume that I went into this looking for a way to cheat the system and making proverbial criminal deals in back alleys, but that was not the case.”
She elaborated, revealing that she had collaborated with college counselor William “Rick” Singer, the mastermind behind the scheme who was later convicted. She emphasized her complete trust in him at the time.
“He recommended programs and tutors, and he was the expert. And after a year, he started to say, ‘Your daughter is not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to, and so I believed him,” Huffman recalled.
The Good Lawyer actress paid $15,000 to falsify her daughter’s SAT scores. She would later plead guilty in May 2019 to “conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud.”
“When he slowly started to present the criminal scheme, it seemed like … that was my only option to give my daughter a future, and I know hindsight is 20/20, but it felt like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it. So, I did it,” Huffman said.
“It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future … which meant I had to break the law.”
The actress revealed that at the time, she had second thoughts. She remembered driving her daughter, Sophia Grace Macy, to take the SAT exam back in December 2017.
“She was going, ‘Can we get ice cream afterwards? I’m scared about the test. What can we do that’s fun?’ And I kept thinking, ‘Turn around, just turn around.’ To my undying shame, I didn’t,” she said.
In March 2019, Huffman, along with several other parents and celebrities, including Lori Loughlin, was arrested in connection after the investigation dubbed Operation Varsity Blues.
“[The FBI] came into my home. They woke my daughters up at gunpoint,” Huffman shared. The actress, shocked beyond reckoning, “thought it was a hoax.”
“I literally turned to one of the FBI people, in a flak jacket and a gun, and I went, ‘Is this a joke?’”
Looking back, Huffman apologized to the “academic community” and the students who “sacrifice and work really hard to get to where they are going legitimately.”
In September 2019, Huffman was sentenced to 14 days in prison, a $30,000 fine and 250 hours of community service. However, the actress only served 11 of those days behind bars. In that time, she volunteered for an organization that helps formerly incarcerated women rebuild their lives.
“They heal one woman at a time — and if you heal one woman, you heal her children, you heal her grandchildren and you heal the community,” the Otherhood actress explained.
Sophia, now 23-years-old, was later admitted to Carnegie Mellon University’s theatre program in April 2020 after she retook the SAT on her own.
A mother’s love knows no bounds, but breaking the law was a little extreme!
Would you break the law for your kid?