Felicity Huffman Reveals the Slippery Slope That Got Her Ensnared in College Admissions Scandal

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It’s been four years since the college admissions scandal broke, revealing that 33 wealthy parents used an illegal side-door scheme to get their children into elite colleges via college admissions guru Rick Singer. Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin were two of the recognizable names involved in the “Operation Varsity Blues” sting operation.

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Both women handled their legal situation very differently after serving time for their bribery and fraud crimes, but now, Huffman is breaking her silence for the first time and revealing how she got roped into the situation. It started innocently enough when the former Desperate Housewives star worked with the “highly recommended college counselor” for over a year, according to her exclusive interview with ABC-7 in Los Angeles. She “trusted him implicitly” as “he recommended programs and tutors” for her daughter, Sophia Macy.

“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,” she continued. That’s when Singer “slowly started to present the criminal scheme” and she believed it was her “only option to give [her] daughter a future” at the time. Huffman knows it sounds “crazy” now, but she had the mindset that “it was sort of like my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law.” That illegal move involved paying a proctor to change Sophia’s SAT answers after she turned in her exam.

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Huffman admitted that she had hesitations while driving to the testing center. “And I kept thinking, ‘Turn around, just turn around,’ ” she said. “To my undying shame, I didn’t.” The 60-year-old actress served 11 days of a 14-day prison sentence in October 2019 along with 250 hours of community series and on supervised release for 12 months. Her husband, William H. Macy, was not charged in the case and Sophia eventually went to Carnegie Mellon University after taking the SATs on her own merit.

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