Felicity Huffman: I thought I had to break the law to give my daughter a future

Remember Operation Varsity Blues? Several high-profile/celebrity parents in the LA area got caught in an FBI sting. The crimes included changing SAT answers, bribing college admissions officials, faking athletic backgrounds to get college admittance and scholarships and a lot more. Felicity Huffman was one of the moms who hired for Rick Singer to “arrange” for an SAT monitor to change her daughters’ SAT answers so the daughter would get a higher score. Felicity pleaded guilty to the federal charges and she got a two-week prison sentence, and she ended up getting released after one week. She also got sentenced to community service, and she’s still working with the same charity, which is why she’s given a big interview. While these are not her first comments on the whole ordeal (circa 2019-2020), this is the first sit-down interview I’ve seen with Felicity since all of it went down.

“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,” Felicity Huffman said. “I worked with a highly recommended college counselor named Rick Singer. I worked with him for a year 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. 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. 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,” she said. “And so it was sort of like my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law.”

The actress — who says she did not tell her daughter Sophia about her plans — recalled having second thoughts about what she had done as she drove her to the 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 told the news outlet. “To my undying shame, I didn’t.”

She served 11 days of her 14-day prison sentence in October 2019. The star was also sentenced to 250 hours of community service and was on supervised release for one year. Huffman completed her full sentence by October 2020. Her husband, Shameless star William H. Macy, was not charged in relation to the event. Her daughter Sophia later retook the SAT and was accepted into Carnegie Mellon University’s theatre program, where she is currently studying.

[From People]

Yeah… it was such a sleazy thing to do, but at this point, I do believe that she was just one of those obsessive helicopter moms who thought she could throw money at “the problem,” the problem being that she didn’t have faith that her daughters could get into college on their own merit. I hope this whole thing was a wake-up call for Felicity with her parenting style too, that she was actually being a sh-tty mother who treated her daughters like they were too stupid to do anything for themselves. Beyond that… she served her sentence, apologized, admitted guilt and she’s spent the past three years doing a lot of charity work. The best way to handle it.

Update from Kaiser: I honestly didn’t see Felicity’s other quotes before I wrote & published this. We will have more coverage coming out on Sunday or Monday.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.

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