Felicity Huffman finally speaks out about Varsity Blues admissions scandal after 11 day prison stunt for bribing her daughter’s way into college: ‘I had to break the law to give her a future’

Felicity Huffman finally broke her silence over the Varsity Blues scandal that saw her spend 11 days in prison after bribing college officials with $15,000 to alter her daughter’s SAT scores, saying she felt she “had no choice.” “than breaking the law.

Huffman paid $30,000 in fines and spent 11 days in jail after being charged with fraud.

He had paid Rick Singer $15,000 to manipulate his daughter Sophia’s SAT scores in 2018 to get her a place in college and was among a group of rich and famous parents swept up in the scandal. Actress Lori Loughlin was also jailed for paying for her two daughters to be accepted into USC.

In his first public comments outside the courtroom, Huffman says ABC who thought it was “a joke” when FBI agents showed up at her mansion to arrest her.

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‘They came into my house, woke up my daughters at gunpoint (again, nothing new for the black and brown community) and then put my hands behind my back and handcuffed me.

‘I asked him if I could get dressed. I thought it was a hoax. I literally turned to an FBI person with a bulletproof vest and a gun and said “is this a joke?”

Huffman said she regretted the plan, but felt she had no choice at the time because Sophia, who previously said she has a learning disability, would not have been accepted otherwise.

Now, Sophia studies theater at Carnegie Mellon in New York.

‘I felt I had to give my daughter a chance for the future. And so it was kind of like my daughter’s future, which meant she had to break the law,” she said.

“I guess I feel like the people I owe a debt and an apology to are the academic community and the students and families who sacrifice and work very hard to rightfully get to where they’re going.”

Huffman is speaking out now to highlight A New Way of Life, an organization that helps formerly incarcerated women reintegrate into society.

“I want to use my experience, what I’ve been through and the pain to contribute something good,” he said.

Huffman and her husband William H. Macy hired Singer to help Sophia improve her scores and get into college.

She claims the plan wasn’t obvious at first, but it became clear when Singer told them that Sophia wouldn’t be accepted into any school without greasing the wheels.

‘After a year, he started saying that his daughter won’t get into any of the universities she wants.

And I believed him. And so, when he slowly began to present the criminal plan, it seemed (and I know this seems crazy at the time) that this was my only option to give my daughter a future.

‘And I know hindsight is 20/20, but I felt like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it. So I did it,” she said.

Sophia did not know that her parents had paid for someone to modify her test answers after completing the SATS.

The scheme involved Singer paying a handful of discreet SAT test proctors who would inflate students’ scores once they had completed the test.

On the day of the SAT test, he said Sophia was nervous and asked if they could go out for ice cream afterward.

“She was like, ‘Can we have ice cream later?’” Huffman recalls. “I’m afraid of the test. What can we do that’s fun? And I kept thinking, turn around, just turn around. And to my eternal shame, I didn’t,” Huffman said.

Loughlin and her husband Mossimo Giuliani had their daughters pose as sports stars, propping them up on rowing machines to falsify applications that portrayed them as athletes.