According to Felicity Huffman, crime was the only way to give her child a future.
Several years go, the infamous “Varsity Blues” scandal erupted. Multiple wealthy, powerful people had used various fraudulent means in order to rig college admissions for their children.
The former Desperate Housewives star was one of the two most famous arrests. She wisely did not fight the charge, allowing attention to shift to Lori Loughlin’s legal battle.
Now, long after serving out her sentence and community service, Huffman is breaking her silence on the scandal.
In an interview with ABC 7, Felicity Huffman emphasized that she did not set out intending to cheat the system. You can watch that interview below.
Instead, she says, blame falls at the feet of William “Rick” Singer, who acted as a coordinator for wealthy clients who wanted to give their children an edge in college applications.
“After a year, he started to say your daughter is not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to,” Huffman said during her interview.
“And I believed him,” Huffman admitted. “And so when he slowly started to present the criminal scheme, it seems like – and I know this seems crazy at the time.”
She continued: “But that was my only option to give my daughter a future.” That’s quite a claim about the daughter of Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy.
“And I know hindsight is 20/20,” Huffman acknowledged. “But it felt like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it. So — I did it.”
“People assume that I went into this looking for a way to cheat the system and making proverbial criminal deals in back alleys,” she observed. “But that was not the case.”
Huffman reiterated: “It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future. And so it was sort of like my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law.”
Perhaps the most important takeaway from this interview was that Huffman did not inform her daughter, Sophia, about the scheme. Sophia took the SAT like any other student … never knowing what her mother had done untilt he arrest.
In fact, it was during the drive to the SAT that Felicity almost backed out of the criminal scheme.
“She was going, ‘Can we get ice cream afterwards?’” Huffman reflected. “‘I’m scared about the test. What can we do that’s fun?’”
She admitted: “And I kept thinking, turn around, just turn around. And to my undying shame, I didn’t.”
We should note that another important revelation is how terrifying the arrest was. Law enforcement burst into the house and awoke her daughters at gunpoint — irresponsibly absurd in most circumstances, especially this one.
“Again, nothing new to the Black and brown community,” Huffman emphasized. “Then they put my hands behind my back and handcuffed me and I asked if I could get dressed.”
Huffman admitted. “I thought it was a hoax. I literally turned to one of the FBI people, in a flak jacket and a gun, and I went, ‘Is this a joke?’” Alas, it was not. Huffman did her time, and apologizes to the academic community. But this story will always hang over her.