Beaufort Co. Schools counselor told student she molested another child, police report says
The Beaufort County School District suspended a Battery Creek High School guidance counselor for two weeks last year after the school reported the woman to law enforcement for sharing disturbing information with a student about being molested decades earlier and in turn molesting a child as a result, according to a district spokesman and a recently released report from the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office.
The student met with the counselor twice to talk about issues, including suspicions that she had been molested by an adult when she was younger, according to investigators.
During those conversations, the counselor — whose name was redacted from the report — intimated that she regarded the student as a “miniature version” of herself and told the student that, in the past, she had sexual relationships with “multiple men” in search of love, according to the report.
The counselor admitted to investigators that she told the student she had molested another child when she was 5 years old.
“I shared that I too was sexually abused at a very young age and when I was 5 years old, I sexually abused a child,” she wrote in the report.
She was adamant, however, that she has not molested any children since that time, according to the report.
The counselor was placed on administrative leave from May 8-23, 2019, Beaufort County School District spokesman Jim Foster said Wednesday.
The counselor is still on staff at the school and counseling students, he said.
Foster declined to identify the counselor or discuss specifics of the case, citing it as a personnel matter.
In a written statement, the 17-year-old student said the counselor “constantly kept comparing herself to me” when she disclosed she may have been molested as a child.
“She said I was a miniature version of her,” the student wrote. “Then we started talking about how I may have been abused as a child and she told me that she had been sexually abused and has molested other children.”
According to the report, the counselor also told the student she “had sex with multiple men because she wanted to be loved too,” and “to lose the makeup because I was drawing negative attention to myself.”
In a May 8 email to district Human Resources Director Alice Walton, the counselor defended her actions, citing a “dedication to protecting children that has driven me my entire life.”
The counselor told Walton she previously worked as a social worker and an investigator for Child Protective Services, and that she was practicing therapeutic self-disclosure, “which I have successfully used to build rapport with victims of abuse over my entire professional career,” in telling the student about her past experiences.
Foster said Wednesday that in situations like this, the district requires employees to obtain a “fitness report” from a medical professional before returning to work.
“Any conversation with a student that went into that level of personal detail is clearly inappropriate,” Foster said.