‘UNDYING SHAME’

Felicity Huffman Breaks Silence on College Admissions Scandal: ‘I Had to Break the Law’

“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,” she told ABC7.

For the first time since being convicted for her role in the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal, Felicity Huffman is speaking out about why she broke the law in an effort to get her daughter into college by any means necessary.

The Desperate Housewives actress admitted in 2019 to paying admissions consultant William “Rick” Singer $15,000 to fraudulently boost her teenage daughter’s SAT scores by 400 points. She was subsequently sentenced to 14 days in prison after she pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud.

Speaking to ABC7 in an interview released Friday, Huffman said, “It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future, and so it was sort of like my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law.”

“After a year [of working with Singer], he started to say your daughter is not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to,” Huffman said, “and I believed him. And so when he slowly started to present the criminal scheme, it seems like—and I know this seems crazy at the time—but that was my only option to give my daughter a future.

“And I know hindsight is 20/20,” she added, “but it felt like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it. So, I did it.”

Describing the day that her daughter, Sophia Macy, was scheduled to take the SAT test that Huffman had rigged, the actress said, “[Sophia] was going, ‘Can we get ice cream afterwards?’ Scared about the test, what can we do that’s fun. And I kept thinking, turn around, just turn around. And to my undying shame, I didn’t.”

On The Inside

Felicity Huffman’s Prison Term Became a Weird Fashion Show

Alaina Demopoulos

Recalling the day she go caught, Huffman said the FBI “came into my home, they woke my daughters up at gunpoint... then they put my hands behind my back and handcuffed me,” Huffman said. “I asked if I could get dressed. I thought it was a hoax. I literally turned to one of the FBI people in a flak jacket and a gun and I go, ‘Is this a joke?’”

After Huffman was arrested, Sophia’s unnamed college of choice rescinded its invitation for her to audition for its theater program. According to a letter written to the federal court by Huffman’s husband, actor William H. Macy, their daughter “called us from the airport in hysterics, begging us to, ‘Do something, please, do something.’”

Four years later, Huffman told ABC7 that her daughter eventually retook the SAT and earned her way into Carnegie Mellon University, where she’s in the drama program.

See more of our coverage in your search results.

ADD THE DAILY BEAST ON GOOGLE

Helen HolmesCulture Reporter

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.