Felicity gets a lesson in equality... on ‘perp walk’!

EVEN with her unwashed hair pulled back into a frumpy pony-tail, dressed in a shapeless blue fleece and wearing large darkframed specs, ‘Desperate Housewives’ star Felicity Huffman was instantly recognisable. As, indeed, was the expression on her face.

Peeved, mortified and positively seething, you could see that the arrival of the photographer, as she was being led away by armed Feds after her earlymorning arrest, had just about put the little tin hat on her day.

Huffman was the major big-game trophy bagged this week by investigators probing the bribery, trickery and brazen fraud used by wealthy US parents to get their dim-witted darlings into the country’s top colleges. She’s one of dozens of well-heeled parents said to have paid huge sums to a corrupt university entrance ‘adviser’ called William Singer to cheat the system and ease their pampered offspring into the academic elite.

He employed Harvard graduate Mark Riddell as the main henchman on his crooked scheme. Sometimes, Riddell would sit the exams in place of the students, having first obtained copies of their handwriting the better to forge their papers. Bribed officials would turn a blind eye as a grown man of 36 turned up for an exam pretending to be a teenager.

Since he couldn’t sit exams for girls, though, his other trick was to get himself appointed as an invigilator, or supervisor, in the exam hall. Then he’d feed the right answers to the student, or else he’d make changes to their papers before they were submitted for correction. And this, it seems, is how he helped Felicity Huffman and her husband William H. Macy swing a high grade for their daughter Sofia Grace.

Both parents were secretly recorded in phone calls with Singer, and then Riddell turned up as an invigilator for Sofia Grace’s exam. Astonishingly, her grade improved by almost 50% on a previous effort. Huffman is alleged to have paid Singer $15,000 for his help, but federal investigators believe that the scheme, which has been running since 2011, has earned him up to $25million.

Most of the 33 parents now charged with using his services paid him sums ranging from $250,000 up to $400,000, but at least one coughed up $6.5million – that kid must have been a particular challenge. His team included college insiders as well as sports coaches, who helped secure coveted sports scholarships to the top universities. Since some of the affluent kids were clearly too dim to convince anyone that they’d scored so well on entrance exams, they instead pretended to be sports stars.

So Singer hired designers to Photoshop their faces onto the bodies of athletes, and submitted photographs of the candidates ‘rowing’, or ‘pole vaulting’, or ‘playing tennis’, when they wouldn’t know one end of an oar, a pole or a tennis racquet from the other.

Best of all, he channelled the payments through a fake charity for ‘disadvantaged youths’, meaning the parents could write their corrupt payments off as donations for tax purposes. The hubris and sheer stupidity of these rich parents is all the more jaw-dropping when you consider that their kids were already guaranteed a prime position in the upper echelons of American society, as the children of top lawyers, financiers, fashion designers, authors and film stars. They really didn’t need to deprive a deserving student from a humbler background the opportunity to make good.

IT seems that, at least in some cases, it was just about making sure that their spoilt darlings got whatever it was their little hearts desired. One student, the daughter of actress Lori Loughlin, tweeted to her 1.5million Instagram followers that she had no interest in school, but just wanted to experience the college party scene. So whether they wanted the prestige of putting Yale on their CVs, or the chance to party with the other rich kids in the University of Southern California, then that was what they would get.

The exposure of the scheme has put a huge dent in America’s boast of being the land of opportunity, a meritocracy where talent and grit, rather than wealth and connections, are enough to get a deserving kid to the top. Discovering that the rich were buying their way into the best colleges, and ensuring that money, power and privilege stayed in the same hands generation after generation, has been an eyeopener for ordinary folk in the US.

In one respect, though, the Americans can still be proud of their egalitarianism. For all her wealth and fame, Felicity Huffman couldn’t escape that ‘perp walk’, this week, after she opened the door of her smart LA home to a couple of armed Federal investigators and was promptly arrested. The photograph of her, all greasy-haired and grim-faced on her way to court, was proof that their cops and prosecutors don’t mess around. For all the scandals, enquiries, crises and corrupt behaviour uncovered here over the past few decades, you’d be hard-pressed to remember the last time you saw a high-profile ‘perp’ paraded before the cameras after a dramatic dawn swoop.