She’s desperate, all right.
In an attempt to bolster her own charitable bona fides through a bizarre mea culpa, “Desperate Housewives” star Felicity Huffman dished out a fresh round of embarrassment for her daughter, Sophia.
And the actress exposed not only the dangers of coddled parenting — but also the sneering contempt the rich and famous have for little people without fancy diplomas hanging on their walls.
In a segment that aired this morning, Huffman, 60, spoke to a local ABC affiliate in her first interview since being convicted of fraud and serving 11 days in jail in 2019, as part of the Operation Varsity Blues scandal.
In the scheme, wealthy parents, also including “Full House” actress Lori Loughlin, paid college admissions guru Rick Singer boatloads of cash to side-step standards and get their kids into elite universities, merit be damned.
“It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future,” said Huffman, who is married to fellow actor William H. Macy. “And so it was sort of like my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law.”
One would have expected that sentiment to come from a mother raising her children on food stamps in the back of a station wagon, not in an LA mansion with her Oscar-nominated partner.
But delusion and entitlement are as dense as the smog in those parts.
Huffman served 250 hours of community service and thought she could trade a little insight into her law-breaking in exchange for flattering coverage of the organization where she ticked off the hours and later became a board member.
Efforts that deserved a big fat F.
Initially, Huffman said, she hired Singer to help Sophia improve her SAT scores, but after a year, he delivered a grim diagnosis.
“He started to say, ‘Your daughter is not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to.’ And I believed him,” she told WABC.
“And 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.”
Huffman paid $15,000 for the privilege of having her daughter’s test scores falsified. It was not only crazy, but her flawed logic is the height of snobbery.
If the girl hadn’t been allowed to remain ensconced in the upper echelons of power via a high-profile institution, she would have been destitute — ruined! Destined to marry a plumber or, worse yet, a ditch digger.
But to quote Judge Smails in “Caddyshack”: “The world needs ditch diggers too.”
You know what we can do without? More actors — especially dishonest ones sending unprepared kids out into the world and feeding the already lush nepo baby ecosystem.
Therefore, Huffman had to cheat and be a lousy parent to boot. She tricked her daughter, who apparently was not aware of the situation, into thinking she’d be good enough to get into the school of her choice on her own.
She rigged her kid’s life to avoid unpleasantness — then unloaded exactly that on the girl this morning by telling the world of Sophia’s academic shortcomings.
It was ironic and moronic.
“I know hindsight is 20/20 but it felt like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it,” Huffman told WABC without a hint of self-awareness.
Perhaps a less prestigious school would have been the best course for Sophia: a lesson that every wish isn’t granted by money and connections. Disappointment and failure can breed grit and resourcefulness.
But our ever-softening society aims to strip away those hardships and as result, the very virtues that help build successful, healthy adults. Instead, we end up with overgrown kids who simply aren’t prepared for the wild world.
They don’t understand how to cope when things don’t go their way — melting down over micro-aggressions and whining about long work hours in TikTok videos.
(As a footnote, the reporter noted Huffman’s daughter retook the SATs and got into Carnegie Mellon).
Operation Varsity Blues, like Huffman’s ill-advised interview, brought into focus how broken — and, yes, monied — our academic system truly is. That truth is even more crystallized by the illiberal culture on display at elite campuses since the October 7 attacks in Israel.
It all seems like an ad for trade school.
Later in the interview, Huffman revealed that, while she was driving Sophia to take her phony SATs, she had second thoughts and kept telling herself to “turn around. Just turn around.”
Words she should have heeded heading into the studio for this sitdown.
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