Rick Curl Arrest: Let’s Connect the Swimming Sex Abuse Dots, From Washington to Baltimore … And All the Way to Colorado Springs

I’ve been too hard on The Washington Post for sharing with readers approximately one percent of what it knows about the sordid and criminal sexual exploitation of adolescent and pre-adolescent girls by their swimming coaches. At least The Post gave Kelley Davies Currin a platform this summer for the revelations about Rick Curl, one of the most successful coaches of all time, and it least it reported Curl’s arrest yesterday. Meanwhile, The New York Times and others are still picking their noses. Something about a guy somewhere who had an “inappropriate relationship,” which USA Swimming, a quarter-century later, figured out had “brought disrepute to the Corporation.”

In the classic definition of chutzpah (“someone who murders his parents and pleads to the court for mercy because he’s an orphan”), USA Swimming is even claiming credit for turning Curl in to law enforcement in July. This comes as a surprise to Kelley Currin, who two years ago told a Washington Post reporter — since relocated to a newspaper in Jacksonville — about Curl’s serial rapes of her and about the $150,000 in hush money Curl paid her family. In March of this year, Currin gave a copy of the 1989 “non-disclosure agreement” to USA Swimming’s Mr. Magoo of an investigator. Several months after that, Currin saw Curl, still credentialed, strolling the deck at the Olympic Swiimming Trials at the CenturyLink Center in Omaha.

(Well, I’m sure glad someone had a deck pass. Karen Linhart, USA Swimming’s public relations director, threatened to have me thrown out of the building when I approached her with a question about the “emergency hearing” her office had announced for sex crime allegations against Noah Rucker, Curl’s underling at the Curl-Burke Swim Club.)

After the Trials, Currin retained victims’ lawyer and public advocate Bob Allard, and The Post‘s Amy Shipley told Currin’s story, kind of, sort of. The newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein’s coverage remains too cryptic by half: it even doctors USA Swimming’s spin-quotes between editions and publishes without comment the organization’s self-serving timeline, which The Post knows full well is full of it.

But hey, don’t take my word for it. Here’s what USA Swimming vice president (and former gold medal swimmer) David Berkoff said in a 2010 email:

“Denying knowledge of Rick Curl … and others banging their swimmers! It’s a flat out lie. They knew about it because we (coaches and athletes) were all talking about it in the late 1980′s and early 1990′s…. I was told Rick Curl was molesting Kelly Davies for years starting when she was 12 by some of the Texas guys.” (See https://concussioninc.net/?p=5902.)

And here’s what Chuck Wielgus himself, USA Swimming’s remarkably durable executive director and chief cover-up artist, said in a May 2010 deposition in one of the many civil lawsuits it is defending against abuse victims:

“I have heard, just within the past three to four weeks, that there was some sort of a settlement between Rick Curl and a victim or a victim’s family.” (See https://concussioninc.net/?p=5797.)

*****

With Rick Curl in the process of either going to prison or copping a plea, the focus turns to how many other prominent swimming figures, at his level or above, will go down with him.

Across the capital Beltway, at Michael Phelps’ North Baltimore Aquatic Club, the membranes of denial and cover-up are getting peeled back on another cell of coach-swimmer molestation. More on that in the next post.

Irv Muchnick

FURTHER READING:

Complete Links to ConcussionInc.’s Coverage of the USA Swimming Cover-Up of Rapist Coach Rick Curl