Actress Felicity Huffman spoke about her participation in Operation Varsity Blues—the government probe that exposed a scandal in which wealthy parents paid for their children to get into college—for the first time, more than four years after she pleaded guilty for her role in the scheme.
Actress Felicity Huffman, escorted by her husband William H. Macy, exits the John Joseph Moakley ... [+]
In an interview with KABC, Huffman said she felt an “undying shame” when driving her daughter, who was unaware of the scheme, to take the SAT—Huffman had paid $15,000 to have her daughter’s score improved.
Huffman told KABC she saw the scheme, orchestrated by admissions consultant William “Rick” Singer, as the “only option to give my daughter a future,” adding she felt like she “would be a bad mother” if she didn’t help her daughter get into a good school.
Huffman said Singer told her that her daughter wouldn’t get into any of the schools she wanted to and he began to lay out the scheme, adding she didn’t start working with him with criminal intent.
In 2019, Huffman pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud and was sentenced to 14 days in prison, community service, a $30,000 fine and a year of supervised release.
$25 million. That’s how much parents of college applicants reportedly paid Singer to get their children into elite schools. The money was used to bribe coaches and administrators at schools like Yale, University of Southern California and Stanford, according to the Justice Department. Singer was sentenced to 42 months in prison and was ordered to pay $10 million in restitution to the IRS.
There were 57 people charged as a result of the Operation Varsity Blues probe, and Huffman—one of the more prominent defendants—was just one of 33 parents charged. The federal probe uncovered a scheme in which parents would pay Singer to falsify their children’s records. Singer, who cooperated with the government during their investigation and wore a wire when working with some clients, admitted to bribing SAT and ACT college admission test administrators, paying college coaches to say students had been recruited to their sports programs when they had no history of playing the sport and falsifying students’ ethnicities to utilize affirmative action programs. Lori Loughlin and her husband Mossimo Giannulli—two of the other big-name defendants—reportedly paid Singer $500,000 in bribes for their two daughters to get into USC. A number of coaches who accepted bribes from Singer were also charged and sentenced for their involvement, including a former Georgetown tennis coach, Gordon Ernst, who admitted to taking more than $3.4 million in bribes from Singer and was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison.