Felicity Huffman speaks out about the bribery case four years after her release from prison

In March 2019, Felicity Huffman was accused in a scandal involving paying bribes to middlemen to allow her daughter to get a place at a prestigious university. Thursday, November 30, the actress spoke for the first time about this topic on American television.

“I felt like I had to give my daughter a chance to have a future,” Felicity Huffman told ABC-7 Eyewitness News. “So it was about my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law,” she said.

Felicity Huffman paid $15,000 to a broker to falsify her daughter Sofia’s college entrance exam results, without telling her. The scandal involved dozens of parents, including actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, who paid $500,000 in bribes to buy their daughters’ admission to the University of Southern California.

The Desperate Housewives actress continued: “People thought I was trying to cheat the system and make criminal deals in back alleys, but that’s not the case.” She then explained that she “worked” with Rick Singer, a “highly recommended college counselor.” “I trusted him implicitly. He recommended programs and teachers to me and was the expert.”

‘His only option’

But soon his words change and he assures the 60-year-old actress that his daughter cannot be accepted into the universities she desires because of her results. “So I believed him,” she confirms. “When he started presenting his murderous plan, it seemed to me – and I know this seemed crazy at the time – that this was my only option to give my daughter a future. “I felt like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do that,” she added. “I did,” she explains.

Once the case was discovered, the actress was sentenced to two weeks in prison, a $30,000 fine, and 250 hours of community service. After allowing his daughter to retake the exams, she was eventually accepted into a prestigious university in Pennsylvania.

Today, Felicity Huffman works with the non-profit A New Way of Life, which is responsible for helping formerly incarcerated women reintegrate. “I want to use my experience, what I went through, and the pain to achieve something good,” she explained in the same interview.