Felicity Huffman begins prison term
Felicity Huffman reported Tuesday to a federal prison in Northern California, where she will spend two weeks for conspiring to rig her daughter’s college entrance exams.
Huffman, 56, will serve her sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, a low-security facility about 30 miles southeast of Oakland, according to Huffman’s representative.
On her release, Huffman must perform 250 hours of community service and remain on supervised release for one year.
The award-winning actress was arrested in March and pleaded guilty two months later to fraud conspiracy, admitting she paid $15,000 to William “Rick” Singer, a Newport Beach, California, consultant who orchestrated a college admissions fraud to fix her daughter’s SAT score.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in September chose to incarcerate Huffman, despite Huffman’s explanation that she believed she was trying to be “a good mother.”
In a letter to the judge, Huffman said she came to view her daughter’s struggles on the math section of the SAT as “a huge obstacle” to her acting dreams. When Singer told her he could “make sure she gets the score she needs,” she said, “I honestly began to feel that maybe I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do what Mr. Singer was suggesting.”
Huffman’s daughter took her SAT in 2017 at a private school in West Hollywood. Unbeknownst to her, Huffman and prosecutors say, Singer had paid an administrator to let Mark Riddell, Singer’s Harvardeducated accomplice, correct the girl’s answers after she finished her test.
Singer and Riddell have pleaded guilty to a number of felonies. The testing center administrator, Igor Dvorskiy, said earlier this month he would plead guilty to conspiracy to commit racketeering.
“I talked myself into believing that all I was doing was giving my daughter a fair shot,” Huffman said.
Talwani was unconvinced. “Trying to be a good mother doesn’t excuse this,” she said in court.
The judge noted that Huffman could offer her children advantages that many families cannot: a comfortable upbringing, tutoring, a private college counselor and connections in the industry her daughter hoped to break into.
And yet, Talwani told Huffman, “you took the step of obtaining one more advantage to put your child ahead of theirs.”
Although Huffman’s attorneys asked she be punished with community service and a fine, Talwani committed Huffman to prison.