Advertisement

Subscriber-only Newsletter

By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

Last week, the actress Felicity Huffman made her first public comments about her role in the Varsity Blues admissions scandal, in which several wealthy parents paid a corrupt private admissions consultant named Rick Singer thousands of dollars to help them cheat to get their children into elite colleges. In 2019, Huffman pleaded guilty to “a single count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud, acknowledging that she paid $15,000 to arrange for cheating on her daughter’s SAT test.” She spent 11 days in prison, paid a $30,000 fine and had to do community service as part of her sentence.

In what was billed as her “first and only” interview about her transgressions, Huffman, who spoke to a local Los Angeles TV affiliate, said: “It felt like I had to give my daughter a future” — a statement that’s both shocking and illuminating.

Shocking because of the wildly narrow view of “a future” she must have had at the time, and illuminating because it helps explain why so many parents and high school students are out of their minds trying to gain admission to a handful of colleges. This is how Huffman described her interactions with Singer:

After a year he started to say, your daughter’s not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to, and I believed him, and so 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. And 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.

OK, wait: Huffman is an Oscar-nominated actor, married to another Oscar-nominated actor, William H. Macy. I haven’t seen their bank statements, but since both were on long-running television series, reportedly making hundreds of thousands of dollars per episode, it’s a safe bet that they don’t have to worry about their children’s long-term financial solvency. And yet there she was a few years ago, presumably panicked about her older daughter’s future.

Huffman’s daughter wanted to attend theater school, which makes the no-future-without-a-good-school claim even more perplexing, because it’s an even safer bet that if her child wanted an acting career, she wouldn’t even have to go to college to reap the benefits of her parents’ show business network.

Despite all this, Huffman reflected that she felt as if she would have been a bad mother if she didn’t give her child every advantage in the........

© The New York Times