Felicity Huffman is reflecting on the “undying shame” she felt following her involvement in the 2019 college admissions scandal.
“It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future,” Huffman, 60, told ABC-7 Eyewitness News on Thursday, November 30, while discussing her involvement with the nonprofit organization A New Way of Life. “And so it was sort of like my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law.”
Thursday’s interview marked the first time Huffman spoke publicly about her role in the scandal, which included paying $15,000 to falsify the results of her daughter Sophia Macy’s SATs. Sophia, now 23, was unaware of her mom’s plan. (Huffman shares daughters Sophia and Georgia, 21, with husband William H. Macy.)
Huffman explained that she did not reach out to William “Rick” Singer, the mastermind behind the “Operation Varsity Blues” scheme, but he planted the seed.
“After a year, he started to say, ‘Your daughter is not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to,’” Huffman recalled. “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.”
Huffman remembered thinking that she’d be “a bad mother” if she didn’t help her daughter no matter what. However, the Desperate Housewives alum started to have second thoughts the morning of Sophia’s SAT.
“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,’” she said of her eldest daughter. “And to my undying shame, I didn’t.”
In March 2019, Us Weekly confirmed that Huffman was arrested at gunpoint for her involvement in the college admissions scandal.
“I thought it was a hoax,” she said of the arrest. “I literally turned to one of the FBI people, in a flak jacket and a gun, and I went, ‘Is this a joke?’”
Huffman issued an apology in April 2019 and pleaded guilty to fraud charges one month later. She was sentenced to 14 days in prison — she served 11 days in October 2019 — and was ordered to pay a $30,000 fine, complete 250 hours of community service and have one year of supervised release. Us confirmed in October 2020 that Huffman had completed her full sentence. (Full House alum Lori Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, were also involved in the scandal and briefly served time in prison.)
Sophia, for her part, retook her SATs and was accepted into Carnegie Mellon University in April 2020.
“I think the people I owe a debt and apology to is the academic community,” she said during Thursday’s interview. “And to the students and the families that sacrifice and work really hard to get to where they are going legitimately.”
