Upper Merion man sentenced to decades in state prison for ‘perverse’ sex acts he committed during burglaries

For much of his life, Ryan Selleny victimized the women around him with his sexual perversion, Montgomery County prosecutors said Monday as they asked a judge to sentence him to decades in state prison for burglary and indecent assault.

As a teen, they said, he stole women’s underwear. On the campus of Edinboro University in Western Pennsylvania, Selleny surreptitiously filmed his female classmates and cataloged the video files with derogatory names. Some of the videos depicted him performing sex acts in public, often feet away from the women he filmed.

His pursuit of sexual gratification continued to escalate, Assistant District Attorney Lauren Marvel said Monday, becoming increasingly intrusive into his targets’ lives.

The worst, she said, was last year, when Selleny, 28, broke into the homes of three of his female neighbors in an Upper Merion apartment complex, stole their underwear and sex toys, and filmed himself masturbating.

He contaminated a juice carton and water jug in one woman’s home with his seminal fluid in an act that Montgomery County Court Judge Wendy Rothstein said was “perverse, outrageous, disgusting, and sickening.”

“Your conduct scarred the victims forever,” she said. “They will never look at their neighbors the same again — they will always wonder if that person is another Ryan Selleny.”

Rothstein sentenced Selleny to 10 to 60 years in state prison after an hours-long hearing and ordered him to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Selleny pleaded guilty in November to committing a series of burglaries at the Kingswood Apartments between October 2023 and March 2024, when he was arrested after one of the victims found a hidden camera he had installed in her home.

Videos stored on the camera included voyeuristic commentary about the woman from Selleny, including remarks about her daily work schedule, dating habits, and personal diary, which he had read during one of his break-ins, according to prosecutors.

Detectives later found thousands of other videos on a hard drive belonging to Selleny, including the videos he shot during his college years. Some of the videos had been shot in another unit at the apartment complex, leading investigators to discover that Selleny had victimized two other neighbors.

In court Monday, Selleny apologized to the women in a statement he read aloud, saying he had forever shamed himself and his family with his actions and fully accepted the consequences of his behavior.

His attorney, Ellis Palividas, asked the judge to fashion a sentence closer to the guidelines set by state law. Palividas argued that prosecutors had asked for too strict a sentence, one that went far above what is normal for a burglary case.

But Marvel, the prosecutor, said that Selleny’s actions constituted much more than a burglary.

“This is, in every way, someone’s worst nightmare,” she said. “This is an individual who committed horrific and violating offenses in ways that showed an obsession with the victims and a real hatred for them, and a real belief that he was entitled to do what he wanted to them without their knowledge, for his sexual gratification.”