By Wonderwall.com Editors
3:01pm PST, Dec 1, 2023
Felicity breaks her silence
Four years after she served 11 days in prison for fraud, Felicity Huffman is speaking out for the first time about her role in the college admissions scandal, telling KABC-7 "Eyewitness News" she wasn't "looking for a way to cheat the system" when she paid $15,000 to have her daughter's SAT score falsified.
"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," she said in the interview, which aired Nov. 30.
Felicity was arrested in 2019, along with dozens of other wealthy parents who used fraudulent means to get their kids into elite colleges like USC and Yale. She ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest service fraud.
Like actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, designer Mossimo Giannulli, who were also convicted in the scandal, Felicity was working with college admissions counselor William "Rick" Springer when she participated in the fraud. In the interview, she said he'd been "highly recommended" and she "trusted him implicitly" after they'd worked together for a while.
"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 explained, adding that Rick "recommended programs and tutors and he was the expert." In fact, he was arranging for lots of parents across the country to commit lots of fraud in exchange for millions of dollars.
"After a year, 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 recalled.
In January 2023, Rick was sentenced to more than three years in prison and ordered to pay more than $19 million after pleading guilty to a range of charges including conspiracy to commit racketeering and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
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Arrest redux
"When he slowly started to present the criminal scheme, it seemed like — and I know this seems crazy at the time — that that was my only option to give my daughter a future," Felicity Huffman said of Rick Springer. "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 actress, whose husband, actor William H. Macy, was not charged, also recounted the day of her arrest, telling "Eyewitness News" she thought it was some kind of prank.
"They woke my daughters up at gunpoint — again, nothing new to the Black and brown community," she recalled. "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?'"
The star was ultimately sentenced to 14 days in federal prison, fined $30,000 and ordered to perform 250 hours of community service. According to USA Today, daughter, Sophia, 23, retook the SAT test, reapplied to college and is now studying drama at Carnegie Mellon.
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Rumor fix
Rumors suggesting Taylor Swift married her now ex-boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, are not only untrue, they're "insane," according to the singer's publicist, who slammed the Instagram gossip account DeuxMoi on Twitter this week.
A recent Deuxmoi post claimed Taylor and Joe, who announced their split in April 2023, had a wedding "ceremony in either 2020 or 2021 in the U.K.," adding that "it was described to me as a 'marriage' by more than one person. It was NEVER made legal." The post also vowed, "I will die on this hill! Put it on my tombstone! I have no reason to lie, I could give a s***."
On Nov. 30, Taylor's longtime PR manager, Tree Paine, made the rare move of replying to the post on X (formerly Twitter). "Enough is enough with these fabricated lies about Taylor from Deuxmoi," she wrote. "There was NEVER a marriage or ceremony of ANY kind. This is an insane thing to post. It's time for you to be held accountable for the pain and trauma you cause with posts like these."
Although Taylor has clearly moved on from Joe with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce, her fans have continued to buzz about the timeline of her split from Joe, with some speculating that certain lyrics on her "Midnights" album suggest she and Joe broke up long before April.
MORE: Check out the glittery Balmain number Taylor Swift wore to Beyonce's movie premiere and more of the singer's best looks
Pickleball gone wrong
Michelle Pfeiffer was sporting quite the shiner on Dec. 1 after a game of pickleball apparently went awry. "WARNING ⚠️ Pickleball-Stay out of the Kitchen!! 😫 Thank you, Less! 🤣," the actress captioned a series of selfies on Instagram showing off her black eye. In the first shot, Michelle, 60, is sitting on a court holding a giant bag of ice against her face while glaring at the camera. The second snap shows a more cheerful version of the star, while the third gives followers a close-up peek at her injury.
"Ouch!" Michelle's pal Naomi Watts commiserated in the comments.
"That's why I don't play," wrote Julianne Moore.
Michelle's sister, DeDee Pfeiffer, meanwhile, chimed in to share that her sib "kept on playing" despite the injury, to which Michelle replied, "life is sweeter with risk."
Rom-com revamp
"Pretty Woman," the wildly successful 1990 rom-com starring Julie Roberts as a prostitute who finds love on the job with a corporate raider (Richard Gere), was not intended to have a happy, Hollywood ending.
"It was going to be a much darker film called 'Three Thousand,'" Julia said on the Dec. 1 edition of the "The Graham Norton Show," according to the Daily Mail. The title referred to the price Julia's character, Vivian, charged Edward for one night together. In the original screenplay, Vivian was a bit different from the adorable, goofy-but-smart character moviegoers fell in love with.
"Vivian was a drug addict and the movie ended with him leaving her in a side street, throwing the money at her and driving away," Julia said. "I got that part in that movie and felt really proud, but when the production company folded and the film disappeared I was crushed. But then Disney picked it up, which seemed so unlikely, and made it funny."
The revamp worked: Soon after its release, "Pretty Woman" became the fourth highest grossing film of all time, worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. It also earned Julia a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination and arguably launched her career.
The actress, 56, currently stars in Sam Esmail's new psychological thriller, "Leave the World Behind," on Netflix.
Conviction upheld
On Dec. 1, an Illinois court upheld "Empire" star Jussie Smollett's conviction stemming from a 2019 hate crime he was found guilty of staging against himself, People reported. The actor, who is Black and gay, told police in 2019 he'd been violently attacked by men yelling racist and homophobic slurs. The men later claimed Jussie had paid them to stage the assault. In 2021, the actor was convicted on five felony counts of disorderly conduct for lying to police about the incident, but the case has gone through the courts multiple times, including one round involving an indictment by a special grand jury, which he tried to have dismissed, according to documents viewed by People. In 2022, he was sentenced to 150 days behind bars, but was released pending his appeal.
