Felicity Huffman broke her silence on her involvement in the college admissions scandal.
For context, the Desperate Housewives actor previously pled guilty to paying $15,000 to have her daughter’s answers on the SAT changed after she took the exam. She subsequently served 11 days in prison and 250 hours of community service. It was part of the “Operation Varsity Blues” FBI investigation that also saw Full House star Lori Loughlin embroiled in controversy.
Speaking to ABC7 for the first time since the scandal broke in 2019, Felicity said, “It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future. And so it was my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law.”
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In late 2017, Felicity drove her daughter to take the SATs — which her daughter didn’t know would be rigged. “She 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,” Felicity recalled.
Felicity then explained what it was like working with Rick Singer, the “admissions counsellor” behind the college bribery scheme. She said, “After a year he started to say, your daughter is not going to get into any the colleges that she wants to. And 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 future. And I know hindsight is 2020. But it felt like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it. So I did it.”
The FBI would go on to arrest Felicity: “They came into my home. They woke my daughters up at gunpoint, again, nothing new to the Black and brown community. Then they put my hands behind my back and handcuffed me and I asked if I could get dressed. And I thought it was a hoax. I literally turned to the one of the FBI people in a flak jacket and a gun and I went, ‘Is this Is this a joke?'”
“I think the people I owe a debt and an apology to is the academic community and to the students and the families that sacrifice and work really hard to get to where they’re going, legitimately,” she continued.
Felicity ended up doing her community service with the nonprofit A New Way of Life, which works with incarcerated women. “I want to use my experience and what I’ve gone through and the pain to bring something good, which is to shine a light on Susan Burton’s organization called A New Way of Life,” Felicity added.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/natashajokic1/felicity-huffman-college-admissions