Felicity Huffman has finally spoken out about the 2019 college admissions scandal.
The “Desperate Housewives” star sat down for an interview with ABC7 Eyewitness News that aired Thursday and admitted she knew it was “crazy” at the time.
“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.
Huffman, 60, explained that she had been working with purported college counselor William “Rick” Singer –– who was eventually convicted for being the mastermind behind the scheme –– 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 recalled.
The actress pleaded guilty in May 2019 to paying $15,000 to falsify her daughter’s SAT scores.
“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,” she said.
“It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future … which meant I had to break the law.”
Huffman admitted to having second thoughts as she remembered driving her daughter Sophia Grace Macy to take the SAT exam 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.
The “Transamerica” star was arrested in March 2019 along with dozens of other prominent parents and celebrities, including Lori Loughlin, following an investigation known as Operation Varsity Blues.
“They [the FBI] came into my home. They woke my daughters up at gunpoint,” she claimed, while adding she “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?’” she remembered.
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She apologized to the “academic community” and the students who “sacrifice and work really hard to get to where they are going legitimately.”
Huffman was ultimately sentenced to 14 days in prison, a $30,000 fine and 250 hours of community service in October 2019. She served 11 days of her sentence and volunteered at an organization dedicated to helping formerly incarcerated women rebuild their lives, A New Way of Life.
“When I saw what A New Way of Life was doing, which is 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,” she said.
Huffman’s daughter Sophia has since enrolled in Carnegie Mellon University’s theatre program after she retook the SAT and got in on her own.
Huffman and her husband of 25 years William H. Macy, who was not charged in connection to the scheme, share daughters Sophia, 23, and Georgia, 21.
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