LOS ANGELES _ Felicity Huffman and a dozen other wealthy parents swept up in the far-reaching college admissions scandal have agreed to plead guilty after being charged in the scheme, according to court records.
The actress and 12 other parents, including Los Angeles marketing guru Jane Buckingham, will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud. San Francisco Bay Area real estate developer Bruce Isackson will plead guilty to one count of money laundering conspiracy and one count of conspiracy to defraud the IRS. His wife, Davina Isackson, will plead guilty to one charge of conspiracy to commit fraud.
Michael Center, the former men's tennis coach at the University of Texas at Austin, will also plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud. Center is accused of accepting $60,000 in cash and a $40,000 donation to his tennis program to ensure a student was admitted as a recruited athlete.
The admissions scheme centered on William "Rick" Singer, owner of a for-profit Newport Beach college admissions company that parents are accused of paying to help their children cheat on college entrance exams and that allegedly falsified athletic records of students to enable them to secure admission to elite schools _ including UCLA, the University of Southern California, Stanford, Yale and Georgetown _ according to court records.
Thirty-three parents have been charged in the case, and others are expected to follow through this week with plans to plead guilty.
Prosecutors said Huffman paid $15,000 for a 36-year-old Harvard graduate to correct her daughter's answers on the SAT, giving the girl's score a 400-point boost over a previous score. Huffman later discussed pursuing a similar scheme for her younger daughter, according to court records.
Her husband, actor William H. Macy, has not been charged by federal prosecutors.
The court documents mention Macy much less than Huffman, but they suggest Macy knew about many of the activities.
In a statement Monday, Huffman acknowledged her guilty plea.
"I am in full acceptance of my guilt, and with deep regret and shame over what I have done, I accept full responsibility for my actions and will accept the consequences that stem from those actions. I am ashamed of the pain I have caused my daughter, my family, my friends, my colleagues and the educational community," she said.
"I want to apologize to them and, especially, I want to apologize to the students who work hard every day to get into college, and to their parents who make tremendous sacrifices to support their children and do so honestly. My daughter knew absolutely nothing about my actions, and in my misguided and profoundly wrong way, I have betrayed her."
Buckingham, who once authored a book titled "The Modern Girl's Guide to Sticky Situations," wanted desperately for her son to attend USC. So the Los Angeles marketing maven _ once called the Martha Stewart of the younger generation _ turned to Singer to help her son score high on the ACT standardized test, prosecutors alleged.
In a phone call on July 12, 2018, Buckingham told Singer that her son had developed tonsillitis and his doctor had advised against allowing him to travel. The plan was for her son to take the ACT at the test center in Houston, but he wasn't able to get there, federal authorities said.
Buckingham asked Singer whether it would be possible to get a copy of the exam for her son take at home _ so that he would believe he had taken the test _ while someone else took it on his behalf in Houston. Singer said he would make it happen.
Ultimately, Buckingham's son received a score of 35 out of a possible 36 on the ACT.
The Isacksons are accused of paying Singer $600,000 to get one daughter into UCLA and another into USC through bribes and other deceitful moves, court records show.
The couple began conspiring with Singer in 2015 to have their older daughter admitted to college as an athletic recruit, according to court records. Their first choice was USC, but plans to sneak the teen into the school were thwarted when her application was inadvertently sent into the normal admissions process, leaving a member of the athletic department who was allegedly working with Singer unable to complete the deal, according to an FBI affidavit.
Singer then turned to UCLA, sending a fake athletic profile he had concocted in May 2016 to Ali Khosroshahin, a former USC women's soccer coach, who passed it on to Jorge Salcedo, the former head men's soccer coach at UCLA, prosecutors say. Khosroshahin and Salcedo have been indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit racketeering.
The girl was admitted to UCLA. Unlike other students who sneaked into schools as faked athletes and then simply did not join the teams, the Isacksons' daughter found herself in over her head on the UCLA women's soccer roster.
For passing their daughter off as a recruited athlete, they transferred shares of Facebook stock valued at about $250,000 to a charity operated by Singer, the FBI affidavit says.
Singer used his charity to pay Salcedo $100,000 and Khosroshahin $25,000 for securing Isackson's admittance, prosecutors say.
The Isacksons then paid Singer an additional $350,000 to rig their younger daughter's college entrance exam and to pass her off as an experienced rower to get her into USC as a member of the crew team, according to court documents.
The Los Angeles Times reviewed a copy of the plea agreement that spells out the terms of the cooperation deal between prosecutors and Bruce Isackson. If, after hearing what Isackson knows, prosecutors decide he has provided them "substantial assistance," they will ask the judge in his case to sentence Isackson to a shorter prison term than what is called for by sentencing guidelines, the agreement shows.
The agreement does not specify what sentence prosecutors would request, but they could ask the judge to spare Isackson prison time completely.
As part of his agreement with prosecutors, Bruce Isackson must pay the IRS nearly $140,000 in restitution. The payment appears to be because Isackson wrote off his payments to Singer's organization as a charitable donation.
