Felicity Huffman breaks her silence on the college admissions scandal: ‘My undying shame’
Felicity Huffman is finally opening up about the college admissions scandal, which saw her briefly incarcerated.
In an interview with ABC-7 “Eyewitness News” that aired Thursday, Huffman, 60, broke her silence about her role in the wide-ranging criminal conspiracy, which was dubbed “Varsity Blues.”
In it, wealthy parents of high school students — including celeb moms Huffman and Lori Loughlin, 59 — were charged with using bribery, cheating and fraud to fake their kids’ ways into elite colleges.
“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. I worked with a highly recommended college counselor named Rick Singer,” Huffman said, referring to the ringleader of the scheme, who was sentenced to 3½ years in federal prison in January.
“I worked with him for a year and trusted him implicitly,” the Oscar-nominated actress said.
“And 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.”
The “Desperate Housewives” star, who paid $15,000 to have her daughter’s SAT answers falsified, served 11 days in jail for the scheme in October 2019. Huffman’s husband, William H. Macy, was not charged with any wrongdoing.
Huffman laid the blame at ringleader Singer’s feet.
“When he slowly started to present the criminal scheme, it seemed like — and I know this seems crazy at the time — that that was my only option to give my daughter a future,” she told the outlet.
“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. It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future,” she said. “And so it was sort of like my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law.”
She did not tell her daughter, Sophia, about the scheme. Sophia has since retaken the SAT and was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University. Huffman’s younger daughter, Georgia, attends Vassar College.
Huffman said that when Sophia first took the SATs, she began having second thoughts about falsifying her daughter’s results.
“I kept thinking, ‘Turn around, just turn around,’ ” Huffman said.
“To my undying shame, I didn’t.”
