Her Only Crime Was Helping Her Kids

A few months ago, Kelley Williams-Bolar started getting phone calls in the middle of the night, telling her she was on the news again. People were tagging her on Facebook and mentioning her on Twitter. “Honestly, I didn’t put the two together! I didn’t think other people would put the two together!” she told me this week.

The “two together” are Williams-Bolar and Felicity Huffman. Both are committed mothers of daughters. Both are working women. Both have become national-media sensations. Both are accused of committing crimes to obtain a better education for their children.

But Williams-Bolar and Huffman are not so much analogues as funhouse-mirror versions of each other, their stories of justice and injustice similar and yet distorted and converse. Huffman, who starred on , has admitted to paying $15,000 for a proctor to correct her daughter’s standardized-test scores. She was swept up in the “” investigation into corruption, bribery, and fraud in elite-college admissions, and today she received a . A Williams-Bolar’s case, calling prison the “great leveler.”