Felicity Huffman: FBI raids are ‘nothing new to the Black and brown community’

True story: while I included the video of Felicity Huffman’s interview with a local ABC affiliate, I only watched about a minute of it, and I just went with People Magazine’s quotes when I covered the story on Friday. To be fair, the quotes I covered were already pretty bad! Explaining why she paid thousands of dollars to pay an SAT proctor to change her daughter’s answers (and ensure a higher SAT score), Felicity said: “It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future. And so it was sort of like my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law.” I was blown away by the sh-tty parenting more than anything else, as I said – to claim that you had to “do crime” because you think your kid is an idiot who can’t be allowed to fail. Anyway, it’s even worse than that.

“It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future,” Huffman said in an interview with ABC7. “And so it was sort of like my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law.”

Huffman said Singer’s name came to her highly recommended and it was a slow process for her to realize his plans involved any illegal activity.

“After a year, he started to say, ‘Your daughter is not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to,’” Huffman said. “And I believed him. 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. 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.”

Once the FBI investigated the operation, they brought federal charges against 33 parents who participated in the plot, including Huffman.

“They came into my home,” she said. “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. I thought it was a hoax. I literally turned to one of the FBI people, in a flak jacket and a gun, and I went, ‘Is this a joke?’”

[From Variety]

“They woke my daughters up at gunpoint. Again, nothing new to the Black and brown community.” I just– how to even unpack this? Does she think that only people of color get raided by the FBI? SWAT teams and FBI raids come for people of every race. It’s like she’s mad that she got treated like a Black or brown person. Lady, you committed federal crimes!! The only reason you’re not sitting in prison right now is because you’re white and rich!

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.

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