With Felicity Huffman pleading guilty Monday for her role in the nationwide admissions scandal, she can move forward with her life by preparing to pay for her crime with what could be a minimal, four-month prison sentence.
The Emmy-winning actress also can begin work on rehabilitating her once acclaimed career. Actually, Huffman may soon be on her way to winning back the respect of critics and fans, even if she can no longer maintain her persona as a friendly, Hollywood mom and supporter of progressive causes.
Huffman, 56, next stars in Ava DuVernay’s highly anticipated Netflix project, “When They See Us.” The project, scheduled for release May 31, is a four-part dramatization of the case of the Central Park Five — five teenagers of color who were wrongly convicted for the brutal 1989 rape of a white female jogger.
Huffman plays Linda Fairstein, the controversial former sex-crimes prosecutor in Manhattan’s District Attorney’s office who oversaw the Central Park Five’s prosecution. Playing this role could be a way for the actress to return to the screen without creating an uncomfortable distraction for audiences.
That’s because Huffman, condemned as one of the public faces of the college admissions scandal, probably won’t be playing a heroic crusader of justice. Instead, Huffman will portray someone who has become perceived in some circles as one of the villains of the racially charged Central Park Five case.
From the trailer Netflix released last month, the streaming service doesn’t appear to be worried about any negative attention that comes from the series featuring Huffman in a major role. Huffman, in the blond wig, appears prominently in the trailer.
The series also doesn’t look like it will shy away from other controversial topics, like the fact that Donald Trump took out an ad in the New York Daily News to call for the teenagers’ execution after they were arrested.
The series was no doubt filmed long before March, when Huffman became one of dozens of wealthy parents who were accused of paying bribes to get their children admitted to top U.S. colleges. After pleading guilty Monday to paying $15,000 to have her daughter’s SAT score boosted, Huffman now faces from four to 10 months in prison.
As the New York Times pointed out, “When They See Us” marks Huffman’s first acting appearance since she became embroiled in a criminal controversy of her own. It’s not entirely clear how the series will portray Fairstein. But given DuVernay’s politics and what’s in the public record, it’s not likely that Fairstein will come off sympathetically.
So audiences won’t feel a huge disconnect between how they feel about real-life Huffman and how they are supposed to feel about the character she plays. Audiences inclined to hate on Huffman these days could get satisfaction from watching her character get her comeuppance after being shown to be wrong about the Central Park Five.
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In fact, Huffman shares a fall-from-grace narrative with Fairstein that could give her performance added dramatic urgency.
Once upon a time, Fairstein was regarded as one of the nation’s most acclaimed and best-known sex-crimes prosecutors. She retired from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in 2001 to become a writer of best-selling mystery novels.
According to the New York Times, the Central Park Five case came at “an anxious moment” in New York’s history, when violent crime was at its peak. In 1989, police arrested five black and Hispanic boys, ages 14 to 16, for the rape and the near-fatal beating of Trisha Meili, who was attacked as she jogged through Central Park after work.
All five teenagers claimed their confessions were coerced, but they were nonetheless convicted in 1990. Twelve years later — after they spent from four to 12 years in prison — DNA evidence pointed to a serial rapist, who confessed to the attack while serving a life sentence for other crimes.
The Manhattan district attorney agreed to vacate the conviction in 2002. But Fairstein has continued to defend law enforcement’s handling of the case in interviews, most recently in a 2018 op-ed for the New York Law Journal. Notably, she has insisted the boys’ confessions were not coerced.
“It was a much more friendly atmosphere, not the bare interrogation rooms,” she told the New Yorker in 2002. “Nobody under 16 was talked to until a parent or guardian arrived. … This was not an Alabama jail where two guys who have been partners for years put a guy in a back room and he doesn’t see the light of day for three days.”
But Fairstein’s arguments have not convinced a growing chorus of critics who believe she has failed to take responsibility for a wrongful prosecution, especially after the city last year released thousands of pages of internal law enforcement documents from the case that reinforced the decision to overturn the convictions, the New York Times added.
In the matter of taking responsibility for actions that cause harm, Huffman has somewhat diverged from Fairstein. After announcing she intended to plead guilty, Huffman won P.R. points and boosted her chances for career redemption by issuing a statement in which she apologized for causing pain to “the educational community” and to her friends and family, notably her daughter.
“I am in full acceptance of my guilt,” Huffman wrote. “My daughter knew absolutely nothing about my actions, and in my misguided and profoundly wrong way, I have betrayed her.”
Meanwhile, Fairstein’s critics got their way in November when the Mystery Writers of America decided to withdraw an award it intended to give her, the New York Times reported. Members of the literary group raised a fuss about her role in the Central Park Five case. One of those writers, Attica Locke, is a writer and producer on DuVernay’s series, according to the Times.
In a series of tweets, urging the organization to honor someone else, Locke hinted at how DuVernay’s docudrama will portray Fairstein. It doesn’t sound flattering, but it does sound like Huffman will have a lot to work with.
Locke tweeted that the former prosecutor is “almost single-handedly responsible for the wrongful incarceration of the Central Park Five.” Locke also wrote that Fairstein “never apologized or recanted her insistence” on the boys’ guilt despite their subsequent exonerations.
.@EdgarAwards As a member and 2018 Edgar winner, I am begging you to reconsider having Linda Fairstein serve as a Grand Master in next year’s awards ceremony. She is almost singlehandedly responsible for the wrongful incarceration of the Central Park Five. 1/
— attica locke (@atticalocke) November 27, 2018
Fairstein fired back at Locke on Twitter, once again defending her office’s handling of the prosecution while minimizing her own role in it, the New York Times reported.
“I was neither the prosecutor nor investigator in the case you mention,” Fairstein wrote. “I was certainly NOT the person who ‘single-handedly spearheaded’ the investigation.”
https://twitter.com/LindaFairstein/status/1067556116735897607
