“It would be so much easier to simply be gay. At least you could find some support and acceptance from others who share your feelings. How many support groups are there for potential child molesters? Call it what you want. That’s what I am. I am a monster."
- An excerpt from one of Matthew Feeney's 1990s-era journals
While there are several events recounted in the recent four-part documentary Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV that are difficult to watch, perhaps the most jarring one tells the story of Drake Bell, who goes on-camera for the first time to talk about being the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of then-voice coach Brian Peck.
But Bell's story might sound sadly familiar to some people in Minnesota's acting community, who remember the case of Matthew Feeney.
Feeney was arrested in 2012 and later pled guilty to molesting two Minnesota brothers, both clients of Feeney’s while he ran a local talent and casting agency for young actors.
However, this case wasn't Feeney's first brush with law enforcement. He also faced charges in Massachusetts that he had sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy in 2011. Even more shocking to the parents of some of Feeney's Minnesota acting clients, in 1993 he had been placed on ten years probation for molesting a 13-year-old boy in his home in 1990, as well as two other minors at a youth summer camp.
And that is just the beginning of the story that includes multiple cases of abuse spread across at least three Minnesota counties and two states, over the course of more than two decades.
"Matti Feeney knows kids. For the past four years he has been a CYC camp counselor and has gained an invaluable education…. He tells his campers that he’ll answer any question they throw at him. In five years, Feeney says he’s answered every one. The youth director has handled every kind of topic— “God, heaven, hell, sex — you name it.”
--From a story entitled "Youth Ministry Proves Rewarding For Feeney," in the October 24th, 1989 edition of The St. Ben's Independent
In 1989, Matthew Feeney was an English and secondary education major at Saint John's University and had recently become the Youth Group Minister at the Church of St. Joseph. He was the subject of a profile in a local church publication, which touted his ability to connect with teens about a wide range of subjects:
The director of youth ministry job is a more than full-time position. Feeney puts in many more hours with his kids than he is actually paid for. They stop by his house after school, for some of the candy he conveniently keeps his fish tank filled with. He eats lunch with the fourth and fifth graders every day at 11:30.
“Many of them don’t have a male role model,” he said.
Every Friday night ten to twelve youngsters show up at his house to watch movies. Feeney even takes some of them out to the theaters, about once a week.
Feeney started working with young people when he was in high school by teaching religion classes. From there he became a CYC camp counselor. Last year, he got involved in the St. John’s Knights of Columbus Youth Ministry program.
Feeney’s involvement with the Knights of Columbus put him in contact with the St. Joseph parish, where he started implementing eight new programs. One of these programs was a Junior High Youth group for eleven to thirteen-year-olds. Feeney found out about the job opening with the parish through his involvement with the Knights of Columbus Youth Ministry program.
But in 1992, a boy accused Feeney of molesting him in his sleep while he stayed at Feeney’s home in St. Cloud. Feeney was the boy’s youth counselor at St. Joe’s Catholic Church at the time. Feeney ultimately pled guilty to abusing one boy at his home and two others while he was a summer camp counselor.
During the investigation, Feeney gave a statement to a detective in which he admitted to fondling as many as a dozen boys in their sleep, mostly while serving as a CYC camp counselor. He told the detective that he believed 90 percent of those victims were 14, 15, or 16 years old.
Despite the police statement, Aitkin County, MN prosecutors filed charges in only two of the cases Feeney confessed to because the other boys said they didn’t remember anything happening. But an investigation by the Minneapolis Fox TV station more than a decade later revealed that police didn't interview all the alleged victims Feeney had admitted molesting.
And I spoke to two different alleged victims who told me that not only had they not been contacted by police, they had no clear sense of whether the abuse even happened. "At the time, I was told that he was touching us while we were sleeping. So I don't..did it happen to me or not? Honestly, not knowing is worse in some ways than having it happen."
Feeney was sentenced to ten years probation, which prohibited him from having unsupervised contact with minors. After Feeney was arrested again in 2011, he declined to disclose to police the details of what he was doing during that decade of probation. But in comments recorded in secret in 2013 by a longtime advocate for sexual abuse survivors, he admitted that some of his actions during that period were “definitely” inappropriate.
“An honest person does 25 years. You’ve got nothing, no way to negotiate. The only defense you have is to keep your mouth shut and say, ‘You’ve got to prove the case and make everybody — including the kids — go through this,'” Feeney also said.
From public records, it appears that Feeney's activities included some acting and he performed in local stand-up comedy clubs. But more troubling, he also had been dressing up as Santa Claus for 21 years — including at a home daycare in Eden Prairie as recently as 2011.
One former Minneapolis actor who asked not to be identified told me that Feeney had discussed his love for dressing up as Santa. "Although that obviously has a different meaning now that I know what was going on with him," he admitted.
Once his probation ended, Matthew Feeney founded Walden Entertainment in 2006, which primarily served as a local casting agency for young actors. At the time, his agency was the only casting agency in Minnesota that focused on casting actors who were minors and he was reportedly quite successful, working with the major talent agencies and production companies in the area.
According to court papers, Feeney would often host X-Box parties at his home with other children, and parents apparently believed it was safe because they trusted Feeney and thought a group of children would be at the home. He was also known for showering favorite youth acting clients with gifts and promises of future work.
However, in 2011, Feeney was charged in Massachusetts with indecent assault and battery on a child 14 or over, enticing a child under 16 and unnatural and lascivious acts with a child under 16.
According to the complaint, Feeney had repeatedly molested the then-14-year-old while visiting the boy's family on a trip from Minnesota in 2010.
In March 2012, charges were filed against Feeney in Washington County, MN, after a local parent came forward to accuse the casting agent of the sexual abuse of her two sons while they were clients of his agency. The charges alleged the local victims were aspiring actors who met Feeney in 2007 and that he provided them with casting opportunities, acting classes, and entertainment.
According to the criminal complaint, Feeney had befriended the boys' mother and would often spend time alone with the boys on camping trips, at film festivals, entertainment parks, and in his home.
On March 2nd, 2012, the boys' mom was on her home computer, posting pictures of her kids on Facebook when one son asked her to not post pictures of him "because he did not like people looking at his body," the complaint stated.
According to the mother, he became upset and when she pressed him about the reason, she said he fell to the ground and started crying, telling her Feeney had touched his privates.
“I almost passed out. For a second, everything stopped,” she said. “Everything in my world stopped.”
She then called her oldest son in and watched as her 6-foot-tall teen also fell to the floor in tears, saying, “Oh no.... mom. He molested me too.'”
The teen then told his mother he never thought his 9-year-old brother was experiencing the same thing.
During the secretly recorded 2013 interview, Feeney claimed that he wasn't interested in someone that young:
“I’m not interested in somebody that age,” Feeney said. “It’s just … it would be like being comfortably gay and then some chick comes up and says, ‘Hey, you want some?'”
However, that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be interested after a bit of time had passed.
“It was basically like, ‘Hang around him, ’cause in four or five years, he’ll be old enough to be someone I’d be interested in,” Feeney said.
Feeney pled guilty in 2013 to two felony counts of criminal sexual conduct in Minnesota. The district court sentenced him to concurrent 109-month and 54-month prison terms. During his incarceration, he also pled guilty in Massachusetts Superior Court to three counts of indecent assault and battery on a person 14 or older, one count of enticing a child under 16, and one count of an unnatural act with a child. The Massachusetts Superior Court sentenced Feeney to five years’ imprisonment to be served consecutive to his Minnesota sentence.
After news of the Washington Country charges broke, another boy surfaced with allegations that Feeney had attempted to pull his pants down while on a camping trip.
Court documents claim that two years earlier, the then-12-year-old and his mother stayed at a Wisconsin campground with Feeney and some other friends, sharing a large tent with him and a few others.
According to the child's mother, the 12-year-old was sleeping next to her because he was cold. While he was lying there, the boy claimed Feeney rubbed the boy’s abdomen with his foot and tugged on his pajama bottoms with his toes. The boy said he thought Feeney was trying to get his pants down.
“A few minutes later, my son woke me up and said he was cold and asked if I would take him to the truck to sleep,” the mother recalled in the court document.
St. Croix County investigators eventually decided not to prosecute the case as an attempted sex crime, because the local district attorney wasn't able to prove what Feeney was attempting to do.
But in the 2013 secretly recorded interview, Feeney said he was "testing the waters."
Feeney said the boy had joked around with him during the day, something the much older man perceived as flirting.
“I was trying to see if there was anything to read into it,” Feeney said, adding that it may have gone another step if the boy had reacted.
In January and February 2014, the two Minnesota brothers sued Feeney and respondents Samaritan Casting LLC (Samaritan), Werc Werk Works (WWW), and Allensworth Entertainment Inc. (AEI), alleging sexual abuse and negligence claims against Feeney; negligence claims against Samaritan, WWW, and AEI.
In July 2016, a Hennepin County jury awarded John Doe 101 and John Doe 102 damages of $974,281.05 and $1,098,796.93, respectively.
In a 2016 interview with the Minneapolis ABC-TV affiliate, the brothers explained why they hope speaking out will keep other kids from becoming victims:
The brothers don’t want to share their names, but they did show us their faces because Matthew Feeney no longer has power over them. For this story will refer to them as they are mentioned in court documents. The older brother is John Doe 101, the younger John Doe 102.
“When I heard that, that um, that it happened to him too, I felt kind of responsible, for not telling anyone” says a distraught John Doe 101. “And I kind of kick myself all the time about it because I could have stopped it.”
The abuse happened years ago but the pain is still real. These brothers were young actors when they were molested by talent agent Matthew Feeney. How did he gain their trust? John Doe 102 says “Well he was just a fun person, you know.”
John Doe 101 says they never talked with each other about being abused. “But neither of us had heard each other’s story about what had happened until the trial itself.”
“I didn’t know he was like the same exact situation” adds John Doe 102.
The boys rejected a settlement offer. They said the jury’s award acknowledges they are victims.
In February 2019, the Washington County, MN district attorney filed a petition for "Judicial Commitment As A Sexually Dangerous Person And Sexualpsychopathic Personality" with the District Court.
The filing noted that currently Feeney was in the custody of the Minnesota Department of Corrections and was set to be released from custody on or around July 1st, 2019. After release, he was scheduled to "be transferred to a prison in Massachusetts to serve a five-year sentence for his conviction in Bristol County Superior Court for the crime of Indecent Assault and Battery on a Person 14 or Over (three Counts), Enticing a Child Under 16, and Unnatural Act With a Child committed in December 2010."
The Washington County Attorney requested Feeney be civilly committed shortly before his expected Minnesota release date, citing his history of sexual incident convictions, as well as an examination of Feeney's history and current state of mind, which estimated he had a near 99 percent chance of reoffending if he were released.
The District Court agreed, and Feeney is now serving an open-ended civil commitment at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Moose Lake. He has declined requests to discuss other possible sex offenses that might not yet be public knowledge, citing his desire not to endanger the possibility of an eventual release.
In the years since his civil commitment, Feeney has worked to carve out a new career as a writer, with help from Pen America. That organization bills itself as supporting "free expression, support persecuted writers, and promote literary culture." Feeney's page on the Pen America site mentions he is currently in prison, but neglects to explain why he remains behind bars:
Matthew Feeney has a BA in English and is currently incarcerated in Minnesota. Feeney’s writing has been published in several anthologies and dozens of mainstream journals, including The Analog Sea Review, The Pinyon Review, ArtLido, The Blue Collar Review, and the Hawai’i Review. Feeney received second place in 2017 from the PEN America Prison Writing Contest for Fiction, first place for the Grandview Award in the 2018 League of Minnesota Poets’s annual contest; and honorable mention in the 2019 PEN America Prison Writing Contest for Drama. Three of Feeney’s poems were performed live at PEN America’s 2019 World Voices Festival; another poem was orchestrated and composed into choral music; and an Object America project featuring a recording of one of Feeney’s poems was exhibited in Paris, Berlin, and Switzerland.
As for the chances that another Michael Feeney might emerge from the Minnesota television and film industry, none of the factors that allowed Feeney to continue to abuse young teens over more than two decades have changed since his conviction.
Anyone in Minnesota can describe themselves as a talent agent or casting director for minors. No background checks or licensing are required.
After talking to a number of local acting teachers and casting agents who worked in the Minnesota film industry during that period, no one was willing to go on the record. One local well-respected acting coach declined to talk on the record about Feeney, who he described as "giving off bad vibes back then." But he spent twenty minutes explaining to me all of the ways in which he protects both his clients and himself from any possible allegations of wrongdoing.
So despite Feeney's numerous convictions and a belief among some Minnesota prosecutors and detectives that multiple victims were never identified, nothing has been put in place to provide an additional layer of safety for Minnesota actors who are minors.
