Finally, Felicity Huffman exposed the college admissions scandal, which landed her briefly in prison.
In an interview with ABC-7 Eyewitness News Aired Thursday, Huffman, 60, broke her silence about her role in the wide-ranging criminal conspiracy, which was dubbed the “Varsity Blues.”
In this story, the parents of wealthy high school students — including celebrity mothers Huffman and Lori Loughlin — are accused of using bribery, cheating, and fraud to rig their children’s way into elite colleges.
“People assume I went into this looking for a way to cheat the system and make proverbial back-alley criminal deals, but that wasn’t the case. I worked with a highly recommended college counselor named Rick Singer,” Hoffman said, referring to the leader of The schemer, who was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in federal prison in January.
“I worked with him for a year and trusted him implicitly,” the Oscar-nominated actress said.
“He would recommend programs and teachers and he was the expert. After a year, he started saying, ‘Your daughter won’t get into any of the colleges you want.’ And so I believed him.”
The “Desperate Housewives” star, who paid $15,000 to falsify her daughter’s SAT answers, spent 11 days in jail for the scheme in October of 2019. Huffman’s husband, William H. Macy, has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
Hoffman placed the blame at the feet of gang leader Rick Singer.
“As he slowly started to advance the criminal scheme, it seemed — and I know this sounds crazy at the time — that this was my only option to give my daughter a future,” she told the outlet.
“I know hindsight is 20/20 but I felt like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it. So, I did it. I felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future,” she said. “And so it was like my daughter’s future, which meant it was “I have to break the law.”
She did not tell her daughter Sophia about the plan. Sophia has since retaken the SAT and has been He was accepted into Carnegie Mellon University. Hoffman’s youngest daughter, Georgia attends Vassar.
Hoffman said that when Sophia took the college entrance exam for the first time, she started thinking again about faking her daughter’s results.
“I kept thinking, ‘Turn around, just turn around,'” Hoffman said.
“It is to my eternal shame that I did not do it.”
