Cops: Counselor Tried To Lure Student Into Sex

AUGUST 20--A college counselor at a Pennsylvania prep school sought to lure an underage male student into a sexual relationship with the promise that she could “get him into Harvard University with her connections,” police allege.

According to a three-count felony complaint filed yesterday, cops began investigating Emily Feeney in mid-May after receiving a report that she was engaged in a “highly sexualized” texting relationship with a student at Malvern Preparatory School, where Feeney, 40, headed the college counseling office and coached the swim team.

Feeney, a Harvard University graduate who captained the school’s swim team, has a Masters from Columbia University and previously worked in admissions at Columbia, Barnard College, and Princeton University. Feeney’s father, uncle, brother, and cousins all attended Malvern, which is about 35 miles outside Philadelphia.

The student, a swim team member, told police that he began receiving inappropriate e-mail and text messages from Feeney last summer, when he was 16. As detailed in the complaint, Feeney (seen above) sent the boy “selfie” photos of herself in “various stages of undress,” including a topless picture.

Investigators reported reviewing hundreds of e-mails exchanged by Feeney and the victim, many of which were “non-professional in nature and sexually suggestive.” While Feeney aggressively pursued the student, the teen did not reciprocate.

In a June 2014 message to Feeney, the victim declared, “Im not interested in you end of story. Im 16 im not into you.”

Though she was getting the brush off from the boy, Feeney appeared undeterred. “I am re opening this conversation in two years when you graduate,” she wrote in one e-mail. “No one would get in trouble and it would be so worth it. Tabled for two years.”

In another e-mail, Feeney wrote, “Girls will come and go (and it sounds like this one won’t be doing much coming but that’s your problem) but friends do not. You can’t ignore and screw over friends for a girl, or a swim meet or anything else. You’ve done that repeatedly to me and I’ve had enough. I don’t need it.”

Feeney also forwarded the student “correspondence with Harvard University personnel regarding the victim” as a “likely letter candidate” for the school’s swim team. In what investigators called a “caveat” attached to the e-mail, Feeney told the student that he owed her “big time. And no high fives.”

By dangling her Harvard connections, Feeney sought to “entice the victim to continue to communicate with her as well as make him feel indebted” to her, investigators allege. The victim told police that while Feeney’s attention was unwanted, she “told him that she could help get him into Harvard University with her connections, and the victim did not want to jeopardize his chance of attending” the Ivy League school.

In a series of messages sent from her school e-mail account earlier this year, Feeney beseeched the student to converse with her. “You are gorgeous and this is killing me. Please talk to me,” she wrote in one e-mail, while another stated, “I adore you – always have, always will.”

At one point, Feeney threatened to have the teen called into her office. “If you’d...Just stop fighting and let it happen, you’d be a lot less uptight and much happier,” she claimed in another e-mail.

Feeney, who has been fired from her job at the prep school, was charged yesterday with three felonies and a misdemeanor in connection with her contacts with the student. Free on $75,000 bail, she is scheduled for a September 2 preliminary hearing. (4 pages)