Felicity Huffman addressed the 2019 college admissions controversy after years, acknowledging that she thought it was “crazy” at the time.
The 60-year-old Desperate Housewives star reflected on the criminal conspiracy In an interview with ABC7 Eyewitness News . Dozens of wealthy high school parents, including famous mothers like Lori Loughlin, were accused in the conspiracy of using illegal fraud, cheating, and bribery to get their children into prestigious universities.
In 2019, Huffman was imprisoned for 11 days after she paid convicted scandal mastermind William “Rick” Singer $15,000 to have her daughter’s SAT exam scores manipulated, per Marca .
Reflecting on the scandal, Huffman opened up that she was merely a mother looking out for her kid. “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 said. “I worked with a highly recommended college counselor named Rick Singer. I worked with him for a year and trusted him implicitly; 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.”
She explained that Singer played on her fear of being a bad mother to get her interested in the scheme, “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. 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.”
As she drove Sophia to the exam, the actress, who claims she kept her plans a secret from her daughter, recalled second-guessing her actions, per PEOPLE . “She was going, ‘Can we get ice cream afterward? I’m scared about the test. What can we do that’s fun?’ And I kept thinking, ‘Turn around, just turn around,’ ” Huffman told the news outlet. “To my undying shame, I didn’t.”
Huffman pleaded guilty to bribing a proctor to alter her daughter Sophia’s exam responses. In October 2019, she completed 11 of her 14-day jail term. The celebrity was also placed on supervised release for a year and ordered to perform 250 hours of community service.
Huffman volunteered her time to A New Way of Life, a group that assists women who have served time in prison to start again, per Marca. After retaking the SAT independently, Sophia was finally accepted into the theater department at Carnegie Mellon University in April 2020. Huffman has two kids with her husband, William H. Macy, who was not indicted in the conspiracy.
After giving her experience some thought, Huffman said that A New Way of Life’s efforts impressed her. “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.”