U.S. District Judge in Los Angeles, California, Indira Talwani will decide next Friday whether to send actress Felicity Huffman to one month imprisonment or give more lenient sentence, based on the conflicting filings by prosecutors and her lawyers.
The prosecutors are asking for one-month prison for her, to be the first parent that will go to jail in the college admissions scandal that exploded in March with the arrests of Huffman and nearly three-dozen other parents.
Huffman pleaded guilty to the fraud conspiracy charge in May, admitting she conspired with college admissions consultant William “Rick” Singer to fix her daughter’s entrance exams.
But since Huffman tearfully admitted her guilt and issued a written mea culpa, she has brought up “quibbles” with prosecutors, they said in a court filing Friday, in an attempt to “imply that [she] is somehow less guilty — that she participated in fraud only reluctantly, without fully understanding it.”
“That is false,” prosecutors wrote.
In a filing of their own, Huffman’s attorneys on Friday requested a year of probation, a $20,000 fine and 250 hours of community service, saying she is remorseful and “deeply ashamed.”
Included in the filing is a letter from Huffman, addressed to the judge who will decide next week whether to spare her or send her to prison.
Huffman told U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani she was “shocked” to hear Singer propose rigging her daughter’s SAT. But before long, she said, she felt a mounting sense of panic that her daughter’s SAT scores were too low and posed a “huge obstacle” to her future.
“As warped as this sounds now,” 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.”
She said she toyed with the idea for six weeks before agreeing to pay Singer $15,000 to fix her daughter’s score.
In December 2017, Mark Riddell, Singer’s Harvard-educated accomplice, changed the girl’s answers after she took the test at a West Hollywood school where Singer had allegedly bribed a proctor to permit the cheating.
