CULTURE

Felicity Huffman’s Desperate Housewives Costar Nicollette Sheridan Comments on College Admissions Scandal

Her Desperate Housewives costar Felicity Huffman was allegedly involved.


57th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards - Backstage, Audience and Architectural Digest Green Room
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Since news of the “Operation Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal broke last week—and, more specifically, of Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin’s alleged involvement—the memes and hot takes have been nearly unstoppable. Seemingly everybody who has even skimmed a headline about the scandal has an opinion about who should play the alleged conspirators in the inevitable miniseries dramatizing it, if not about its undercurrent of unchecked privilege and elitism. Among these reactionary masses are several celebrities (college-educated and otherwise), including Huffman’s former Desperate Housewives costar and friend Nicollette Sheridan.

During an interview with Access Live on Monday, Sheridan, who now stars on Dynasty, was asked about her thoughts on the scandal and gave an impressively thoughtful and measured response. “We don’t know the facts. But we can be extremely disturbed by the entitlement, the power, and money that can take away from less privileged. And that, to me, is disgraceful,” she said. “So we’ll see where it really stands. I think there are ways to remedy a system that isn’t working and, I think, has been broken for a long time.”

Sheridan continued, “I don’t want to get into how to fix it, but it’s troublesome. It’s troublesome because it can change the life path of a child that is deserving.” Though she declined to share any “gossip” about whether she’d spoken with the rest of the Desperate Housewives cast about this “disgrace,” she did note, “I think everybody should be talking about it. It’s a huge problem.”

Neither Huffman nor Loughlin has commented on the allegations, and, in fact, Huffman deleted all of her social media accounts on Friday after a court appearance. Both actresses were taken into custody last week; Huffman quickly posted her $250,000 bail and was released on Tuesday, while Loughlin didn’t post her $1 million bail until Wednesday, after she’d returned to the U.S. from Canada, where she’d been filming. (Loughlin’s husband, Mossimo Giannulli, posted his own $1 million bail on Tuesday, and Huffman’s husband, William H. Macy, has not been named as a defendant in the case.)

Besides the legal drama and the many online reactions to Loughlin and Huffman’s alleged participation in Operation Varsity Blues, in which they’re accused of using a middleman to bribe university officials to get their children into elite colleges, the actresses are also facing consequences in their careers. Though the future of Huffman’s part in Ava Duvernay and Netflix’s When They See Us is still unclear, Loughlin has been completely dropped by the Hallmark Channel; her fate in Fuller House, also a Netflix production, is unknown.

Related: What Happens to Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin’s Careers Now?