Felicity Huffman has spoken out about her involvement in the college admissions scandal.
The Oscar-nominated actress sat down for an interview with ABC-7 Eyewitness News on Thursday to reflect on her role in the scheme, in which she paid William 'Rick' Singer to falsify her daughter's SAT exam results in 2017.
"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. I worked with a highly recommended college counsellor named Rick Singer," Huffman stated. "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 told the outlet that she believed working with Singer was the only way to give her daughter "a future".
"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," the Desperate Housewives star continued. "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," she added. "And so it was sort of like my daughter's future, which meant I had to break the law."
Huffman insisted that she felt doubts about the scheme when she drove her daughter Sophia, now 23, 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 recalled. "To my undying shame, I didn't."
The actress pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud and served 11 days of her 14-day prison sentence in October 2019.
Sophia later retook her SAT exams and was accepted into Carnegie Mellon University.
