An ex-Delco official is on trial for sexually harassing two of his female subordinates
Tim Boyce, the former head of Delaware County's Department of Emergency Services, is on trial this week for indecent assault and harassment.
When Tim Boyce grabbed his executive assistant’s buttocks in 2024, she said Monday, she wasn’t sure how to report the incident to authorities in Delaware County.
“The director of all emergency services, all 911, just assaulted me and made me feel the worst I had ever felt in my life,” the woman said at the start of Boyce’s trial on charges of indecent assault and harassment involving two of his former employees.
“I didn’t know who to trust at that point,” she said, adding that she later told Boyce, then the head of county’s department Department of Emergency Services, his behavior had made her feel disgusting and “like a piece of meat.”
Boyce was fired in May 2024, not long after the woman filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in which she also said he grabbed her cheeks and attempted to pull her in for a kiss.
Criminal charges followed soon after that incident, along with allegations that Boyce had assaulted and harassed another female employee, who told investigators that Boyce showed her pictures of his penis, pulled up her skirt and asked her if she enjoyed a particular sex act.
In court Monday, Deputy Attorney General Madelyn Abry told jurors Boyce was confident that because of his position of authority, no one would find out about his actions.
“What she thought she was getting was a job that would help her,” Abry said of the first victim. “But what she got was a job that was too good to be true.”
Abry said the woman left her office on the day of the assault and never came back, resigning in a text exchange with Boyce in which he apologized to her.
Boyce’s attorney, Andrew Edelberg, denied those assertions, telling jurors “there is not a single piece of corroborating evidence anywhere” supporting the charges against him.
No one else witnessed the alleged assaults, he said, and the two women waited several months before reporting them to police.
He described Boyce as a 40-year public servant, starting as an Upper Darby firefighter who “ran into burning buildings to save children.”
The allegations, he said, came at a time when Democrats had come to power in the longtime GOP stronghold of Delaware County, and Boyce, a Republican, was “low-hanging fruit” for them to target.
Edelberg also suggested that former District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer, who, at the time the women came forward was running for attorney general saw the case as a way to boost his campaign. Stollsteimer lost his bid for that office and is now a county judge.
“This case is about power, politics and punishment, because of an administration change, and because someone was running for office and couldn’t look weak on TV,” he said. “And what else? Money, money, money.”
Both women have filed civil suits against Boyce and the county, and Edelberg said they were motivated, in part, by potential monetary settlements.
Boyce’s trial is expected to last through Friday before Delaware County Court Judge Stephanie Klein.
