Felicity Huffman Felt Like She Would Be a "Bad Mother" If She Didn't Participate in College Admissions Scandal

"I had to give my daughter a chance at a future."

Felicity Huffman is opening about her participation in the college admissions scandal for the first time. In a new interview with ABC-7 Eyewitness News, the actress reflected on her crime of paying to have her daughter Sophia's SAT scores falsified and what drove her to do it. 

"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," Huffman explained of the fraud, in which wealthy parents of high school students paid to fake their kids' ways into elite colleges. "I worked with a highly recommended college counselor named Rick Singer. I worked with him for a year and trusted him implicitly. And 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."

Huffman continued, "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. And so it was sort of like my daughter's future, which meant I had to break the law."

Related: Felicity Huffman Issues Her First Statement After the College Admissions Scandal

Felicity admitted that she did, however, have seconds thoughts about going through with the scheme when she drove her daughter 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 said, adding: "To my undying shame, I didn't."

In 2019, Huffman pleaded guilty to her role in the scandal and served 11 days in jail. She was also sentenced to 250 hours of community service and supervised release for one year. Her husband, actor William H. Macy, was not charge in the crime, while the couple' daughter Sophia later retook the SAT and was accepted into Carnegie Mellon University's theatre program.

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