Felicity Huffman Could've Kept Quiet, Instead She Spoke Out And Removed All Doubt
Felicity Huffman (right) and her husband, William H. Macy, walk out of the courthouse in Boston on Sep. 13, 2019. Huffman was sentenced to 14 days in prison and community service for her role in the college admissions scandal.
We used to be a proper country. A country that collectively didn’t wear white after Labor Day. A country that openly ate hot dogs and watched baseball. A country that could uniformly agree that the rich were to always be despised by the rest of us. And then something changed ― a glitch in the matrix and slowly fashion purists said wear white whenever you want! Health nuts began researching what makes up a hot dog and found that just a bunch of beef parts thrown together probably shouldn’t be consumed. And the rich somehow convinced some of us that they are the victims of their wealth.
I know. I know. What happened to us?
We used to be good at shaming the rich, punishing them for their extravagant and excessive lifestyle. But we are soft now, even willing to listen to the punishing weight of their financial success.
Cue the violins.
During an exclusive interview with Los Angeles news station KABC, Felicity Huffman softly explained that despite being an extremely rich “Desperate Housewives” actress who is married to uber wealthy William H. Macy, one of the stars of “Shameless,” and whose children have most likely been cared for by the best au-pairs (which is French for live-in nanny) and attended some of the best schools money can afford, she still shelled out some $15,000 to ensure that her child got into her preferred college.
Huffman honestly claimed that she believed she would be a “bad mother” if she didn’t pay someone to boost her daughter’s SAT scores. So she forked over the price of a used Honda Civic with low mileage to ensure that her oldest daughter, Sophie Grace Macy, would receive a score making her eligible for the top school of her choice. After the scandal ― Operation Varsity Blues, a $25 million bribery scheme that included editing test scores and fake scholarships ― got exposed in 2019, Sophie Grace got a college offer rescinded, but still landed softly at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon drama program, which has an acceptance rate of less than 5%, because the wealthy never fall too far from their gilded perch.
So Huffman is now on her near-tearful redemption explain-a-thon after serving 11 days in the pokie, performing 250 hours of community service and paying a $30,000 fine (all which was finished in October 2020), and Huffman wants the American common man to know that she is just like you.
“It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future,” Huffman said. “And so it was sort of like my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law.”
There were so many other options besides breaking the law. Huffman could’ve paid for her daughter to attend any college she actually got accepted to. Huffman could’ve waited to see what her daughter’s SAT score was before she paid to have them boosted. Huffman could’ve trusted that the money she’d already invested in her daughter’s education was enough.
But did Huffman do any of this? Of course not. Instead, Huffman paid to play and in turn paid the price, and now she’s doing the thing that the rich do when they actually believe that they are victims of crimes they created. You know, the apologetic plea to commonfolk America where they look all teary-eyed and explain that they didn’t have another choice but to fork over the cash to help their child get into a prestigious school because they never want their child to hear the eerie sounds of a commoner’s “no!”
This was never about giving her daughter a chance, this was about avoiding the one word that makes rich people’s skin crawl. And that is the hardest part for the rich to accept ― that at some point you are going to be treated like everyone else, and no amount of money will change that. And that’s what Huffman paid for. She paid for exclusivity even when it wasn’t there. Everyone with money was doing it. This million dollar scheme was built on rich folks’ abhorrence of the word “no.”
It’s rich folk kryptonite.
But here’s the rub: I believe that Felicity Huffman actually believes that this was her only option. I believe her when she says that she felt like this was the only choice for her as a mother, because this is the delusion that wealth creates: this insulated world in which juice is always freshly squeezed, bed sheets and pillowcases always match, and exclusive colleges don’t accept the students, in fact, it’s the other way around. It’s a belief that the world will continuously bend to your will as long as you are willing to pay. And Huffman was. She reached out to Rick Singer, the mastermind behind Operation Varsity Blues and noted she was in.
“After a year, he started to say, ‘Your daughter is not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to,’ and I believe[d] him,” she said. “So when he slowly started to present the criminal scheme, it seems like ― and I know this seems crazy at the time ― but that was my only option to give my daughter a future. 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.”
What Huffman couldn’t deal with –– and what millions of families across the world not only know, but have to embrace –– is the disappointment that comes with realizing that your child’s best wasn’t good enough. Being wealthy affords you enough money to never have to settle. And so Huffman paid for the access that wealth affords.
“She was going, ‘Can we get ice cream afterwards? ... What can we do that’s fun?’” Huffman said, adding that her daughter was nervous. “And I kept thinking, ‘Turn around, just turn around.’ And to my undying shame, I didn’t.”
Huffman’s shame wasn’t undying. There was no moral crisis here. Huffman was motivated by the bigger fear of attending a cocktail party in which she’d be asked what school Sophie May was attending, and she would have to shamefully admit that it wasn’t a school deserving of the family name. Because in these circles it is not a question as to whether her daughter was going to college ― she was always going to college ― it was whether she was going to the college that she wanted to attend.
Huffman is a part of the moral elite in which whiteness doesn’t know the invasion of privacy or the imposing inconvenience of an FBI raid.
“They came into my home. They woke my daughters up at gunpoint. Again, nothing new to the Black and brown community. Then they put my hands behind my back and handcuffed me, and I asked if I could get dressed,” she shared. “I literally turned to one of the FBI people, in a flak jacket and a gun, and I went, ‘Is this a joke?’”
This might be the most telling phrase in Huffman’s interview as these are the words of a woman who actually believes that there are two different worlds, and she’s not wrong. There is the world in which she lives, and the one in which Black and brown people are the only ones who have ever had the FBI run into their homes. Two worlds. One world where money can change college admittance and the other world in which the Supreme Court just gutted college admittance affirmative action.
Huffman said the quiet part out loud, and in turn, we all got a chance to take a hard long look at the other world and the self-inflicted victimization that comes with being rich and breaking the law. The funniest part of all of this was that the world moved on. No one was thinking about it until Huffman brought it all back up. She could’ve just kept quiet but that must be hard for her when she’s used to shelling out cash, and silence doesn’t cost a thing.
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