Felicity Huffman Breaks Her Silence on College Admissions Scandal

Felicity Huffman is speaking publicly about her role in the college admissions scandal that led to her 2019 jail sentence. The Oscar-nominated actress, 60, opened up in an interview with ABC-7 Eyewitness News that aired Thursday, reflecting on her decision to pay $15,000 to convicted scam ringleader William “Rick” Singer in order to have the results of her daughter’s SAT falsified.

Huffman is just one of dozens of wealthy parents, including Full House‘s Lori Loughlin, who were busted as part of “Operation Varsity Blues” for using bribery, cheating and other fraudulent methods of getting their kids into elite colleges. In 2019, Huffman served 11 days of her 14-day jail sentence after pleading guilty to paying to have a proctor change daughter Sophia’s SAT answers. Her husband, Shameless actor William H. Macy, was not charged.

Huffman revealed in Thursday’s new interview that while she didn’t go into her daughter’s college journey “looking for a way to cheat the system and making proverbial criminal deals in back alleys,” she found herself in a bad spot after hiring Singer, a “highly recommended college counselor” whom she trusted “implicitly” after working together for a year. “And after a year, he started to say, ‘Your daughter is not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to,’” she recalled. “And so, I believed him.”

“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,” the Desperate Housewives actress continued. “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.”

The actress didn’t tell her daughter about the scheme, and she remembered having second thoughts about what she had done as she drove the teen to her exam. “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,’ ” Huffman recalled. “To my undying shame, I didn’t.”

Following her time behind bars, Huffman also completed 250 hours of community service and a year of supervised release by October 2020. Sophia would go on to retake her SAT and was accepted into Carnegie Mellon University’s theatre program. Now that Huffman has put the scandal behind her, she’s looking to put her “pain” towards “something good,” bringing awareness to A New Way of Life, the nonprofit at which she performed her community service and that provides aid like housing, job training, and clothing to formerly-incarcerated women.