Felicity Huffman Faces Judge in Reckoning Over College Scandal
Felicity Huffman Faces Judge in Reckoning Over College Scandal
(Bloomberg) -- She’s won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her acting, but in a Boston courtroom Friday it will get real for Felicity Huffman as she learns whether she must add inmate to her bio.
Huffman, who faces U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani this afternoon for her part in the biggest college admissions scam ever prosecuted in the U.S., is the first parent to be sentenced in the sprawling case. Legal experts see her coming punishment as a rough template for how the 14 other parents who have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud will be treated -- and some think it’s unlikely she’ll be sent to prison.
The star of “Desperate Housewives” and “Transamerica” admitted in May to paying $15,000 to college counselor Rick Singer, the scheme’s mastermind, to change the answers on her older daughter’s college-entrance exam, producing a surge of some 400 points over the preliminary SAT Sophia took on her own a year earlier. Huffman, one of the first parents to acknowledge her crime, has pleaded with the judge in court papers to be spared prison and given a year of probation plus community service instead.
“Given her profile, it creates sort of a platform for the government to really go out of their way and argue that nobody is above the law,” said Brad Bailey, a former federal prosecutor in Boston who’s now in private practice and isn’t involved in the case.
Still, he said, that may mean prosecution and probation, rather than incarceration.
Huffman must do a month behind bars to send a message that wealthy parents can’t buy their children’s way into college, Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Rosen argued at a hearing last week. In his sentencing memo, he called her a “sophisticated businesswoman” and not “somehow less guilty” than the crime she committed.
Diane Ferrone, a criminal defense lawyer in New York who also isn’t involved in the case, said the essential corruption of Huffman’s act will be clear to the judge.
“She paid someone to get her daughter the SAT scores she didn’t deserve,” Ferrone said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some kind of jail time is imposed, and wouldn’t be shocked if she got two months.”
The case, which rocked academia -- and no small number of nervous parents across America who wondered if they’d also crossed the line -- involves a total of 51 defendants, including 34 parents and a smattering of test-center personnel, college athletic coaches and Singer’s staff.
Nineteen of the parents, among them “Full House” star Lori Loughlin, chose not to seek plea deals with prosecutors. They’re fighting an indictment that features a money-laundering charge for sums paid to a charity the U.S. says Singer used to process bribes.
Some of the parents’ payments went to boost their kids’ test scores, while other payoffs were for a handful of corrupt coaches at elite universities, the government says, from Stanford and the University of Southern California to Georgetown and Yale. The coaches put the kids on recruiting lists, assuring them of admission whatever their test scores -- or athletic prowess. None of the colleges or students were charged.
But it isn’t clear exactly who, if anyone, was a victim of the scam and how much financial harm, if any, resulted, and federal courts consider these factors in sentencing. To some criminal defense lawyers, even the month in prison prosecutors are seeking for Huffman is a stretch.
They note that the U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services office, which writes sentencing recommendations based on federal guidelines, itself suggested zero to four months for Huffman and concluded there was no victim, or financial harm, in the case.
“Anytime the guidelines range starts with zero, there is a very strong argument for alternatives to incarceration,” Bailey said. That will count with Talwani, he said.
“She’s going to factor in how promptly Felicity Huffman accepted responsibility, by being one of the very first parents who agreed to plead,” Bailey said. “A cascade of other parents then decided to plead who could’ve been influenced by her. That fact, and that her actual bribe involved the low figure of $15,000 -- I believe there’s a good chance she’ll get a non-custodial sentence.”
Some lawyers said the sentence will reflect Talwani’s view of whether parents who agreed to plead out should get a break.
“This isn’t a drug case. It’s not organized crime,” said New York criminal defense attorney Marvyn Kornberg, who didn’t work on the case. “This is a parent who was doing what she thought was the best for her child and has now gotten her comeuppance for doing it.”
A nationwide racket like Singer’s, spreading corruption from wealthy homes to testing centers to college campuses, isn’t likely to be repeated. But with the intense competition to get into top schools, there will always be temptations.
“It’s now up to the judge to decide what message she wants to send other parents who are thinking of doing this,” Kornberg said.
Huffman’s lawyer Martin Murphy accused prosecutors of comparing “apples to oranges” by leaving out key details when invoking past cases and saying defendants are “routinely” sentenced to prison for defrauding schools. He also told the court his client has done volunteer work for women with breast cancer and the homeless and tutored disadvantaged students.
In her own letter to Talwani, Huffman, 56, said she didn’t seek out Singer to cheat, but because the Los Angeles public school Sophia attended had just two college counselors for more than 600 students. She said she later agreed to his scheme only after he warned her the tutoring “would not be enough.”
“In my desperation to be a good mother I talked myself into believing that all I was doing was giving my daughter a fair shot,” wrote Huffman, who said her decision to cheat has “haunted” her.
It’s likely to haunt others as well, Ferrone said, noting that even if Huffman doesn’t go to prison, she’ll “forever be a felon.”
“The government definitely got the value of deterrence in this case, because there were so many high-profile parents and celebrities involved,” she said. “I think your average parent isn’t going to be willing to engage in this kind of behavior in the future.”
The case is U.S. v. Abbott, 19-cr-10117, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts (Boston).
To contact the reporters on this story: Patricia Hurtado in Federal Court in Manhattan at pathurtado@bloomberg.net;Janelle Lawrence in Boston at jlawrence62@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey
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