Felicity Huffman has finally spoken out about the 2019 college admissions scandal.
The “Desperate Housewives” star sat down for an interview with ABC-7 Eyewitness News aired Thursday where she 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.
However, Huffman explained that she was working with college counselor William “Rick” Singer –– who was eventually convicted of operating 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 claimed.
In 2019, Huffman pleaded guilty to paying $15,000 to falsify her daughter’s SAT scores.
“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, 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, 60, said.
At the time, the “Transamerica” star felt like the only way to “give my daughter a chance at a future” was to “break the law.”
Huffman even admitted to having second thoughts when actually going through with the scheme when 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.
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Huffman was eventually arrested along with a 33 other prominent parents and celebrities, like Lori Loughlin, in March 2019 after federal authorities discovered what they called, 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.
