Actress Felicity Huffman, who spent 11 days in jail after bribing college officials $15,000 to fudge her daughter’s SAT scores in what was part of the infamous college admissions scandal, said she felt she had “no option” but to break the law in order to give her daughter “a future.”
“People assume that I went into this looking for a way to cheat the system in making proverbial criminals deals in back alleys, but that was not the case,” Huffman insisted in a recent interview with ABC, breaking her silence on the matter for the first time since the scandal unfolded.
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“I worked with a highly recommended college counselor named Rick Singer,” the Transamerica star continued. “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 I believed him,” she added.
“And so, when he slowly started to present the criminal scheme, it seemed like — and I know this seems crazy — that that was my only option to give my daughter a future,” Huffman said. “And I know hindsight is 20/20, but it felt like I would be a mad mother if I didn’t do it.”
As Breitbart News reported in 2019, Huffman, who plead guilty over her role in the Varsity Blues college admissions bribery scandal, served 11 days of her 14-day sentence, and had to pay a $30,000 fine, as well as complete 250 hours of community service.
Huffman told ABC that when she first thought it was a “joke” when the FBI showed up at her mansion to arrest her.
“They came into my home. They woke my daughters up at gunpoint. Again, nothing new to the black and brown community. Then they put my hands behind my back and handcuffed me and I asked if I could get dressed,” she said.
“I thought it was a hoax,” the actress added. “I literally turned to one of the FBI people, in a flak jacket and a gun, and I went, is this a joke?”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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