Felicity Huffman is “still processing” life after the college admissions scandal and the 11 days she served in prison for her involvement.
“How I am is kind of a loaded question,” the actress, 61, told the Guardian in an interview published Tuesday as she reflected on the ordeal.
“As long as my kids are well and my husband is well, I feel like I’m well.”
She also noted that she hasn’t worked much following her release from prison in October 2019.
“I did a pilot for ABC recently that didn’t get picked up. It’s been hard,” Huffman detailed.
“Sort of like your old life died and you died with it.”
“I’m lucky enough to have a family and love and means, so I had a place to land,” she added.
The failed pilot was a “Good Doctor” spinoff titled “The Good Lawyer,” according to Deadline.
Huffman also starred in a pilot for an ABC comedy in which she played the owner of a minor league baseball team, but it did not get picked up either.
The “Desperate Housewives” alum was sentenced to two weeks in prison after she pleaded guilty to paying someone $15,000 to take her daughter, Sophia Grace Macy’s SAT in 2019.
She was formally charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud. The actress served her time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif.
In addition, she was ordered to pay a $30,000 fine, complete 250 hours of community service and serve one year of supervised release.
She shares Sophia Grace, now 23, and Georgia Grace Macy, 21, with her husband, “Shameless” star William H. Macy, 73.
Sophia eventually took the SAT on her own and was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa.
Huffman broke her silence regarding the tumultuous period of her family’s life last December.
“People assume that I went into this looking for a way to cheat the system and making proverbial criminal deals in back alleys, but that was not the case,” she told ABC7 Eyewitness News.
She went on to explain she blindly followed William “Rick” Singer, a college preparation coach behind the entire scheme.
“He recommended programs and tutors, and he was the expert. And after a year, he started to say, ‘Your daughter is not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to,’ and so I believed him,” she reflected.
“When he slowly started to present the criminal scheme, it seemed like … 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.”
The Emmy winner added, “It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future … which meant I had to break the law.”
Of course, she wasn’t the only celebrity to spend time behind bars for the scandal; Lori Loughlin was infamously sentenced to two months behind bars for falsifying her daughters’ involvement in their high school’s rowing team to gain athletic scholarships to the University of Southern California.
In addition to the jail time, she agreed to pay a $150,000 fine and perform 100 hours of community service after pleading guilty.
Her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, served five months in prison, paid a $250,000 fine and completed 250 hours of community service.
