Heat Is on USA Swimming’s Alpha Bad Guy Coach Mark Schubert — Whose Story Has Key Connections to Sarah Ehekircher Abuser Scott MacFarland. Here’s a Nugget the Mainstream Coverage of Schubert Is Omitting.

by Irvin Muchnick

Six years after U.S. Olympic swimming head coach Mark Schubert got forced out of that job in a six-figure settlement with USA Swimming, the Orange County Register is doing the full-tilt boogie on Schubert’s decades of enabling sexual abuse in his programs and on his specific role in the decades-long cover-up of the ultimately convicted statutory rapist coach Rick Curl.

Bully for the Register. The new coverage of reporter Scott Reid has included the general controversy surrounding Schubert and his blind eye to abuse; the unheeded warnings to him from famed swimmer Dara Torres and from his former assistant and key whistleblower, Dia Rianda; and a new lawsuit targeting Schubert by Ariana Kukors, grooming/abuse victim of coach Sean Hutchison.

As we move along, Concussion Inc. will be rolling out stories on how all this connects with the story of Sarah Ehekircher’s grooming and abuse at the hands of her own teen coach. That coach, Scott MacFarland, comes out of Schubert’s Mission Viejo coaching tree. So do many tawdry others.

For now, I want to point out a key element missing from Reid’s stories to date. I don’t consider it a superfluous detail. My guess is that it’s just unbearably painful for the Southern California Newspaper Group to acknowledge anything that might possibly dilute their hype of groundbreaking exclusivity.

In 2013, in the course of covering Rianda’s lawsuit against Schubert for wrongful termination at his Golden West club in Huntington Beach, my colleague Tim Joyce and I published discovery documents slam-dunking Schubert’s knowledge of Hutchison’s inappropriate relationship with Kukors. In 2010 Schubert had hired a private investigator to spy on Hutchison and Kukors at USA Swimming’s professional training center in Fullerton. He was the leaker of the Washington Post story that led to Hutchison’s resignation.

See “Read It Now — Olympic Coach Mark Schubert’s Private Eye’s Report on the Cohabitation of Rival Coach Sean Hutchison And His Swimmer,” May 14, 2013, https://concussioninc.net/?p=7488.

See also “Mark Schubert — Who Falsely DENIED Hiring a Private Investigator to Follow Sean Hutchison — Now ASSERTS He Hired P.I. to Track Rapist Rick Curl,” May 24, 2013, https://concussioninc.net/?p=7560.